Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions (PART 1 OF 2) by Library Machine Broke

Praise for Look for Me in the Whirlwind Listen to these voices of young men and women—from places like New Jersey or Panama or New York or Antigua—who poured their insights, courage, and creative energy into New York City’s fledgling Black Panther Party that generated chapters in all five boroughs. Unlike out west, where police shot and killed Panthers to disrupt the revolutionary group, New York relied more heavily on courts, jails, and prison to sabotage the organization. These men and women were tried in the case called the “New York 21”—a barrel full of preposterous crimes which the Panthers supposedly conspired to commit— that led to the arrest and imprisonment of all the leaders. The state fully expected that the Panthers would remain behind bars for decades after being convicted, given that a police informant had masqueraded as a Panther until their arrest. However, the powerful example of Afeni Shakur, who defended herself, other defendants who took charge of their legal representation, the fierce dedication of brilliant attorneys, and the organizing talents of Panther supporters on the outside made the trial the longest running case in New York—with a short one-hour jury deliberation before finding the 21 not guilty on all charges. The case received worldwide publicity and garnered financial support from wealthy New Yorkers to help offset the exorbitant costs of legal fees and bail. This new edition allows a host of new readers to hear these amazing stories and gain from learning the authors’ reflections and insights for today. —Kathleen Cleaver, Black Panther Party communications secretary, 1967– 1971; senior lecturer, Emory University School of Law In the midst of this current iteration of the Black freedom struggle, we are in constant search of reminders and sources of strength. Stresses on our time, our bodies, our Spirits, can sometimes feel overwhelming . . . and then we think about what those who struggled before us gave, and continue to give. The Black Panther Party, and the New York 21 in particular, serve a tremendous inspiration. They affirm for us that the struggle is always worth it when it contributes to the liberation of our people. We have been immensely fortunate to share space with and gain wisdom from members of the Party who have sacrificed so much for us, especially Baba Sekou Odinga and those who have served and continue to serve as political prisoners. This release of Look for Me in the Whirlwind challenges all of us—those who are active, and those who have yet to become activated—to step into our sacred duty to fight for our freedom and win. —Melina Abdullah, #BlackLivesMatter leadership team; chair, California State University, Los Angeles, Department of Pan-African Studies

This book finds us teetering on the precipice of . . . What? Imperial implosion? Democracy devastated? Capitalism collapsed? The Great Society in rags? Hope?! This is a better time than most to mine our past for lessons and inspiration. And for white people to listen to Black history, Black struggle, and Black resistance. We have so much to learn if we are to be allies in building a new future. This book is the right place to start. —Frida Berrigan, Witness Against Torture, Plowshares, and War Resisters League activist; author of It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions could not come at a timelier moment in history. As newly emerging grassroots movements challenge state violence against Black people in the U.S., it is essential that new generations learn anew, and that older ones are reminded, of police and FBI tools of repression deployed to demobilize Black radical activism and its growing influence on the Black working class in the ’60s. These remembrances, by those framed in the Panther 21 case, are vital building blocks for reconstructing the history of one of the least understood chapters of the Black Panther Party. They are also indispensable reading for those seeking to understand how individual activists and their movements were able to hold their center in the face of harrowing government repression. —Johanna Fernandez, professor of history, Baruch College Department of Black and Latino Studies, City University of New York; co-curator, ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York

LOOK FOR ME IN THE WHIRLWIND

From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions

Sekou Odinga, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Shaba Om, and Jamal Joseph Edited by dÃ©qui kioni-sadiki and Matt Meyer Foreword by Imam Jamil Al-Amin Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal

2017

LOOK FOR ME IN THE WHIRLWIND

Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions Edited by Matt Meyer & déqui kioni-sadiki © 2017 © 2017 by: Kuwasi Balagoon, Joan Bird, Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor, Robert Collier, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Richard Harris, Ali Bey Hassan, Jamal, Abayama Katara, Kwando Kinshasa, Baba Odinga, Shaba Om, Curtis Powell, Afeni Shakur, Lumumba Shakur, and Clark Squire Introduction to the 1971 edition © Haywood Burns This edition © 2017 by PM Press ISBN: 978-1-62963-389-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959612 Cover by Josh MacPhee Interior by Jonathan Rowland 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PM Press PO Box 23912 Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com

“If people don’t know where they have been and what they have been they don’t know what they are. They don’t know where they’re going to have to go or where they still have to be. History is like a clock; it tells you your time of day. . . . It’s like a compass that you use to locate yourself on the map of human geography: politically, culturally, financially.” —John Henrik Clarke, Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Professor of African History, Cornell University

“You are trying a political case under a criminal guise for the elite ruling class of this Babylon. . . . You deny us our Constitutional rights according to the Fourth Amendment of the racist Constitution of this country and you know you are denying us those rights. . . . If I had one hundred thousand dollars, I wouldn’t even bail myself out. You serve to educate Black people better than anybody in the world. . . . All we ask for is justice. That’s all we ask for. Four hundred and fifty mother-fucking years we ask for justice.” —Richard Dhoruba Moore (aka Dhoruba Bin Wahad), New York Panther 21 trial transcript

Contents Dedication to Sundiata Acoli

Foreword: Look for Me in the World by Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin

Look for Yourselves: An Introduction by Shaba Om

Panther 21 Poetry: Newly Discovered or Rarely Seen

Whirlwinds All Around Us: The New York Panther 21 in 21st-Century Revolutionary Context by Matt Meyer

The Past Catches Up to the Present by déqui kioni-sadiki

The Case of Sundiata Acoli

Parole 2016: Ride and Denied by Sundiata Acoli

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle by Sundiata Acoli

A Brief History of the Black Panther Party and Its Place in the Black Liberation Movement by Sundiata Acoli

Senses of Freedom by Sundiata Acoli

Still Believing in Land and Independence by Sekou Odinga

The Last of the Loud: New and Revised Commentary by Dhoruba Bin Wahad

Urban Police Repression: Criminalizing Resistance and Unraveling the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, Timeline of Empire, Racial Profiling, Police Violence, and Class compiled and written by Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Paul Wolf

Assata Shakur, Excluding the Nightmare after the Dream: 103 The “Terrorist” Label and the Criminalization of Revolutionary Black Movements in the USA by Dhoruba Bin Wahad New Age Imperialism: Killing Africa Softly, with Democracy by Dhoruba Bin Wahad

125

Man-child in Revolution Land by Jamal Joseph

129

Photo Section: Original Work by Stephen Shames

140

Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the 155 New York 21 (full text, from 1971 edition) Photo Section: Original work by David Fenton

533

Counting to 21, Part One: Remembrances, Corrections, Biographies, and Eulogies: Overview by Matt Meyer, with Cyril Innis Jr. (Brother Bullwhip)

543

Poem for Sundiata by Assata Shakur

559

Counting to 21, Part Two: New Reflections on Members of the 21

563

Photo Section: From the Archives

571

Ready to Step Up: Lumumba Shakur and the Most Notorious Black Panthers by Bilal Sunni-Ali

579

Consciousness, Community, and the Future by Ali Bey Hassan

587

Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide (excerpt of the classic 1969 pamphlet) by Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor

591

Building a Bridge to the 21st Century (excerpt from an unpublished letter) by Kuwasi Balagoon

597

How Committed Are You? Excerpts of a Talk at Green for All’s “Dream Reborn” Conference, Memphis, 2008 by Afeni Shakur

599

Look for Me in the Whirlwind (poem-lyrics from the jazz interpretation) by Bilal Sunni-Ali

601

Black Panther Party Platform and Program

603

Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal

607

Acknowledgments

609

Author/Editor Biographies

613

Index

615

DEDICATION TO SUNDIATA ACOLI A New Afrikan political prisoner of war, mathematician, and computer analyst; former member of the Harlem branch of the Black Panther Party and the New York Panther 21

The editors and authors dedicate this book to Panther 21 member Sundiata Acoli, trapped in the dungeons of the imperial prison system that designates defense against genocide to be a crime. At eighty years old, a political prisoner of war for well over forty years, Sundiata remains a stalwart struggler for the freedom of all and the liberation of the Black/New Afrikan nation; he remains an inspiration for current, past, and future generations because of his undying love for the people, his academic brilliance, his consistency, and his all-encompassing smile in the face of torture.

Though hardly known outside a small circle of ardent supporters, Sundiataâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s case is surely one of the best examples of callous and heinous acts of U.S. hypocrisy: forgiving, pardoning, and embracing and funding violent perpetrators of abusive human rights policies while turning a deaf ear on Sundiataâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s petitions for humanitarian release. If any word, sentence, poem, paragraph, or section of this book moves any reader even just a little bit, may it move them (you!) to take greater action on his behalf in the year to come. Mention him during dinner; tell a neighbor, friend, and family member; include information about him at an event; bring information about him to a concert; demonstrate; donate money; join the campaign for his immediate release. http://www.sundiataacoli.org/

FOREWORD LOOK FOR ME IN THE WORLD Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown)

In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful 1. By (the Token of) Time (through the Ages), 2. Verily Man is in loss, 3. Except such as have faith, and do Righteous Deeds, and (join together) in the mutual teaching of Truth, and of Patience and Constancy. Qur’an 103 1. By the Token of Time through the Ages (I swear by the Afternoon) 2. Man is a loser. 3. Except for those who Believe and do Righteous Deeds and enjoin upon each other Truth and enjoin upon each other Patience. Qur’an 103 Behind every Throne is an Altar—He who excuses himself Accuses himself. Truth is The Eye of the Storm, And I . . . xiii

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No more than a raindrop in search of a Fertile Place to fall, a scribe whose ledger is the Wind, a Poet who speaks to the Deaf, a Teardrop in the Face of Time, a Rainbow in the Mind of the Blind. LOOK FOR ME IN THE WORLD, when . . . The sharpest sword is sharpened on the Contempt of Death. Martyrs without Borders. Harvest from the Seeds of the Survivors of THE MIDDLE PASSAGE, those who by my Lord’s Leave, could not be broken . . . would not be broken. The ANSWER of the Prayer of those chained and shackled, Buried in the hulls of slave ships . . . Made to lie in their own waste; on their necks, the scars of chains, and on their bodies, imprinted the Indelible Evidence of an Unyielding Cruelty . . . Human Cargo, Denied the crumbs of Human Compassion . . . an Execrable Commerce—Commodity by Circumstance . . . Political by Birth. Enduring the Blessed Curse (the Mission Placed in our Hands) . . . Placing Our Thoughts Above understanding, in order to . . . Over-stand. Complex Completeness Moving Together gracefully . . . While going our own separate Way; Bound Together at Faith, thus divisible only by the Invisible. un-related Relationship . . . often-rarely occurring. Commonly— un-common . . . Unique. Complete in the Purest Heart . . . So to avoid defeat. I have stood still and stopped the sound of d-feet. I Brought the Heat when Heart was the Beat. From talk’n Drums to Cyber . . . Hold’n all Hataz Libel. Holy-Cost denial set . . . Hate’n on me cause I keep forget’n to forget! For-Get!!! Ain’t no beat for this . . . Punks Jump-up to get Beat for this! 20/20 Hindsight only Allows you to see Clearly what you Missed. People who lose sight of the Next World become Blind in this one. Double-Vision . . . as if seen only through one eye . . . Only the most intelligent Fool . . . Dare give it a try. Truth is the Cry of All . . . but, the Discipline of the few.

Foreword

There is no worse Lie than . . . Truth . . . Misunderstood by those who say . . . they knew. The Mercy of The Creator is the Door Conscious Struggle comes through. For those who Boast about the excellence of their ancestors, we say . . . that is True, but what about You? Truth is a trust. Falsehood is a treason. Justice is a Master Virtue, no light matter, no nicely calculated less or more, no civil right issue: “To respect the law in the context in which the Negro finds himself is simply to surrender . . . self-respect.” —James Baldwin Just Truth, as it Prevails over Falsehood. Silence is no longer the Poet. Every soul delivers itself to ruin by its own acts. He who excuses himself Accuses himself. The World when . . . Cubs no more . . . The Young Lions Roar . . . World wind perfumed by the Fragrance of Bravery . . . From the cradle to the grave . . . We became old at a young age. In a world—when justice and law are two different conversations . . . Justice (a product commercially registered by “Bar Codes”), Law (Weaponized Litigation) intellectual masturbation that yields no fruitful ejaculation! (The World When) you are at ease with Eulogies . . . tell’n lies about those who die. “Among them is (many) a man who says: ‘Grant me exemption and draw me not into trial.’ Have they not fallen into trial already?” (Qur’an 9:49). 40 Year Pause on the Cause . . . if not for the LOVE of Allah I don’t care nothing about none of y’all. Tongues that stay Dry from things they don’t say. The Deafening Silence! Revolutionary High-Ate-Us . . . Battle Call . . . Sab-bat-i-Call. When the Lion kills . . . it’s the jackal and the vulture who gets fat. Bullet-holes in the Minaret say the Crusades Ain’t Over Yet. We Belong to This Fight! The World when, Step ‘N to the Front from the Legion of Warriors and Warrior Queens With “a Made-up-mind” Whirlwind Theme . . .

xvi

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Look for Yourself . . . A Love Supreme! A Fat dog makes a Poor Hunter! Allah’s Slave, Jamil Al-Amin, U.S. Penitentiary Tucson, December 2016 In Peace, Strong! In Battle, Strongest!!!

LOOK FOR YOURSELVES AN INTRODUCTION Shaba Om

We, the members of the New York Panther 21, were indicted for conspiracy to destroy public property, to hurt and maim police officers and other officials. It became clear after our long trial and acquittal that the real conspiracy was on the part of the police and the U.S. governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to disrupt and destroy the activities of a central branch of the Black Panther Party. Harlem has always been a special place. From the time of the Harlem Renaissance to our time in the 1960s it was a center of powerful Black thoughtâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;of women and men working for our freedom. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois and Congressman Adam Clayton Powell were key figures. And, of course, Minister Malcolm X was a renowned leader of the Harlem community. The U.S. government also saw Harlem as an extremely key place. They were very upset about the Panthers having a strong branch there. Harlem being Harlem, we had a very active chapter, including wide distribution of our newspaper up and down 125th Street. We covered every corner with the paper, which was filled with information on the hardships facing the Black community and the need to fight back. The Panther 10-Point Program was primarily a means of educating the community and the Panther newspaper included both the program and details of how people were dealing with it. But what I really learned while on trial with the 21 was that from the point 1

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

of view of the U.S. government, educating our people was a detriment to “American society.” We were very proud of who we were as a people. As we began to learn and read about our history from renowned historians and activists, the police and the government came down really hard on the New York branch. There were at least three undercover officers in our chapter, working to weaken us at all times. There was a Bureau of Special Services (BSS, popularly known as the “Red Squad”) within the New York Police Department, which was essentially a local part of the FBI’s illegal Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). My comrade Kwando Kinshasa and I were not arrested or captured on the original day of the roundup of the 21; we were caught in Columbus, Ohio, some time later. When we were brought back to New York we were connected to our other comrades on Rikers Island. Once we were all together, we were asked to write a book—the book that became Look for Me in the Whirlwind. We all agreed to put our stories together, to speak about ourselves personally and about our collective work as Panthers. The title centered on a speech from noted Pan-Africanist the Honorable Marcus Garvey. What makes Look for Me in the Whirlwind still current today is that a lot of the same political issues that existed then are relevant even now. As you go through the original book and read the various sections, if you overlook the date you won’t be able to tell whether you’re reading about the 1960s or reading about today! What would be interesting to do is to continue reading—and then pick up today’s newspaper. You’ll find a startling series of parallels. What touches me as a member of the 21, having real love for my comrades, is that a lot of them are with us physically while many others are not. The power of the printed word is a really beautiful thing, and here in the 21st century we are fortunate enough to be able to “hear” the members of the 21, now once again in print and thereby making a connection to the 21st century. The love and compassion that we had for the people back then we still have just as strongly today. It is an honor and a pleasure to have the baton picked up, so that proud young people today can better understand the shoulders they are standing upon. Harlem is still a very interesting place: still very culturally significant, but with widespread gentrification. We as a people bought into the myth that we would never and could never amount to anything. We learned the myths that the schools perpetuated: that we couldn’t have any sense of ownership but could only serve others. Harlem, we must remember, is very strategically located. You can get anywhere in the world from Harlem in just a matter of hours. It was a well thought-out and calculated plan to gentrify the com-

Look for Yourselves

munity—to destroy us through misinformation and miseducation, through drugs, and through direct purchasing of the buildings and the land. But the power of a whirlwind is that it comes out of nowhere and takes over everything. It has a unique beauty about itself—in the sense of ultimate transformation. Our 21 was of the 1960s, and now we all face the 21st century. As Panthers, we were always taught to have undying love for the people. That love was there then, it is here now, today, and it will remain forever. It must and will encircle and protect us all. Read who you are, and be who you are. And look for yourselves—discover yourselves—in the whirlwinds of the 21st century.

PANTHER 21 POETRY NEWLY DISCOVERED OR RARELY SEEN

The Lesson Afeni Shakur Malcolm woke up and saw what appeared to be the mountain of liberation— then he was murdered. Martin started up that mountain and found there was beauty and lasting peace—he was murdered. Huey went all the way up and came down again to speak to the world of the solidarity there—he was shot and kidnapped. Eldridge saw my desire to go up and showed me the rugged path—he was forced into exile. Bobby took my hand to lead me there and I found the way rough and exhilarating and of course he was gagged, beaten, and chained. Fred overheard their directions and took to the hills for a closer look— what he saw made him go back down to share his happiness. When he came back in the valley, all I could hear him say was— I am a Revolutionary. But, it made no sense, and so I just sat and listened. 5

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

The next day I heard him repeat this melody as he prepared the morning meal for my child. I heard the words—and still I was quiet; Fred didn’t seem to mind—he just kept doing things and singing his song. And then one day—the melody of his song was taken up by the evil winds of human destruction. They heard its message and handed to him the salary of a people’s servant KA BOOM . . . The air that breathed his message to me was alive with urgency. The mountains became a reality. The tools became friends. The curves became mere objects of jest! I could sit still no longer. I began to hum his song. As I climbed, as I fell and got up and fell again—I Sang the song of liberation. I AM A REVOLUTIONARY! I AM A REVOLUTIONARY!

Panther 21 Poetry

Truth Is a Virus Sundiata Acoli and Walidah Imarisha Guerrilla plague Brought from bastard tongues Blood from a burst blister Blood on the legs of a sister We are the fever that heals as it burns Our rage purifies Harbingers of chaos and construction. Living virus running through your system Resurrecting those you hit at but missed â&#x20AC;&#x2122;em We are the war coming home The second coming of Rome Defeated abroad and destroyed from within Never to terrorize or rise again. Revolutionaries birthed and homegrown Smeared on cheeks like ash He smiles at all his grandchildren He knows the inside of vaccination needles And sterilization pills His heart bursting with so much love And so much fear Hoping his strong arms Can build a shelter Against the coming epidemic. He smiles at his grandchildren, loving them so, But still must send them where angels fear to go Grossly unprepared because they havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t been trained Their schools long ago razed, teachers routed and cadre maimed. Eyes so wide You can see the future in â&#x20AC;&#x2122;em And deep as a new york sewer drain This child has my eyes And they are too old for this polished apple face.

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

A pug nose And a wide grin mouth Eyes searching the landmarks for 95 south Think you can make it thru That’s easy to do . . . Once, twice but how about the rest of your life? You can not hope to understand Infinity But 33 years starts to stretch Farther than forever As the blood slows In our collective veins In stasis Mosquitoes in amber With the lifeblood Of ancestors Suspended inside us. 33 years and more is just a meatball compared to foreparents who did cradle to grave and still stood tall. That same blood Yet courses our veins Their same message drumbeats Over and over again. The solutions to a problem Lie in its origin. Human history is long Ours goes back To the beginning, Before the spread of false images That keep the world lamenting. So the call of the Ancients

Panther 21 Poetry

Who had the strength of 10 Will forever remind us when Once we were free, And that we, and the world, Shall be Free again.

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

Lock Step Kuwasi Balagoon Auburn Correctional Facility (Excerpt from an unpublished letter to Meg Starr, December 10, 1984) They march in formation lock step in cadence so that their bodies don’t betray their fear by jerky-hesitant motions. Head straight on order by order so that the folder cannot confirm under-certain eyes. They make noises “hut, two” to think “hut, two” and whatever they are told instead of possible death. And they think of dying anyway even though they are used to thinking whatever they are told. And they think they should be honored for this. And they shall be increasingly with grenades.

WHIRLWINDS ALL AROUND US THE NEW YORK PANTHER 21 IN 21ST-CENTURY REVOLUTIONARY CONTEXT Matt Meyer

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.” —Assata Shakur, member of the New York Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, and inspirational figure for the Movement for Black Lives Historians and linguists like to remind us that “radical” means “back to the roots”—and this book seeks to serve contemporary people’s movements by exploring the roots of an extraordinary part of modern history that has largely been hidden from view. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense certainly has had more than its share of attention, but the extremely active and influential New York branch—around which the essential case of the New York Panther 21 was centered—has received significantly less focus among activists or scholars. The Panther 21 case was essential in part because it served as the major launching point of the U.S. government attack on the modern Black Liberation Movement (the original, often underscored, “blm”). If we are to understand current government machinations, we must gain a deep understanding of the Panther 21. And we must do so in the context of contemporary events.

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.” There can be little question that Black Lives Matter (BLM) has signified a burgeoning rebirth of the Black Liberation Movement (blm). With distinct chapters in close to forty locations and many, many more affiliated and connected groups and sympathetic individuals throughout the world, the naysayers have been shown that BLM is much more than just a hashtag. But it is also more than can be personified in a single organization—with related and parallel structures like the Movement for Black Lives, the Ferguson Truth Telling Project, and frontline activists, the Dream Defenders, Justice League and Gathering for Justice, and countless others. There are many clear and common goals, demands, experiences, and hopes, but one consistent thread is a militancy based in part on the mantra-like recitation of four sentences penned by Assata Shakur, who was once called “the soul of the Black Liberation Army (BLA).” Many now have heard of Assata and read her autobiography, and some wear T-shirts proclaiming, “Assata taught me.” Yet when questioned about vital historical markers—people and places barely one step away from Assata herself—confusion or ignorance too often abounds. Leaders have been asked: “Have you heard about Sundiata Acoli? Are you familiar with Sekou Odinga? Do you know the name Dhoruba Bin Wahad?” All three are closely connected to Assata both personally and politically, but their names and work—past and present—are practically unknown outside of a very small circle of mainly elder organizers. The first of these, Sundiata, remains in prison at age eighty, still doing hard time after more than forty years behind bars for activities he and Assata were involved in together. Sekou was finally paroled after more than thirty-three years in prison, convicted in part for being involved in the escape and freeing of Assata. Dhoruba, coauthor with Assata and Mumia Abu-Jamal of Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War against Black Revolutionaries, was field secretary of the Black Panther Party in New York, the organization Assata joined in her early years. He remained a political prisoner for nineteen years until his release in 1990, after proving he was framed as part of the FBI’s illegal Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Sundiata, Sekou, and Dhoruba have more in common than their connection to Assata, more than the fact that they serve and served substantial prison time because of their political beliefs and actions, and more than the simple fact that they were members of the Black Panther Party and allegedly part of the Black Liberation Army.

Whirlwinds All Around Us

Sundiata, Sekou, and Dhoruba were all members of the infamous case of the New York Panther 21. **

“We must love each other and support each other.” Tupac Shakur is arguably the most influential overall artist of the late 20th century—rapper, emcee, vocalist, poet, actor—and is certainly one of the era’s top-selling performers even years after his death. Tupac’s mystique and legacy in the areas of culture, politics, community-based economics, prison life, and more continue to shape new generations. There can be no doubt that his extensive effect on people draws in part on his own upbringing, as the son of a prominent Panther surrounded by a street survival ethic, a social commitment, and a sense of possibility using bold, creative imagery to go up against systemic injustice. The video for Tupac’s smash hit “Dear Mama” has over a hundred million views on YouTube—and it’s impossible to listen to the song without some awareness that Afeni Shakur was a Black Panther. It should therefore also be no surprise that one of his most consistent and supportive “uncles”—Jamal Joseph—is now a professor and former chair of Columbia University’s Graduate Film Division, nominated for an Academy Award for his own artistry. But Afeni is somehow more remembered for being a crack addict than for her successful defense—while on trial and pregnant with Tupac, and against the advice of many—of herself and her comrades, ultimately getting all charges dropped against the 21 targeted and hunted defendants. She was married, at the time, to Lumumba Shakur, a founder of the Panthers in Harlem, whose brother Zayd Malik was killed in the shootout where Assata and Sundiata were captured. Lumumba himself was assassinated in New Orleans just two days before the arrest of Tupac’s stepfather Mutulu Shakur, himself a Black liberation militant who has always asserted both his own innocence and that Lumumba’s death was politically motivated and based on the early 1980s roundup, incarceration, and murder of militants still committed to the struggle. Everyone knows Tupac Shakur. But how many know the history of Lumumba or Afeni Shakur, or of Jamal Joseph? Afeni Shakur, Lumumba Shakur, and Jamal Joseph were all part of the infamous case of the New York Panther 21. **

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

“We have nothing to lose but our chains.” Some leading human rights advocates have asserted that 21st-century movements for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) liberation are the cutting edge political issues of our times. Others focus on the continuing struggles opposing militarized police violence—especially in light of heightened attacks on young people of African and Latino descent—as fundamental to understanding contemporary civil rights within the USA. On a broader scale, both LGBT and anti–police violence movements are increasingly understood within an international context, where deep-seated issues of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism are interwoven for a holistic and “intersectional” approach toward individual and collective liberation. New organizational structures challenge old authoritarian or centrist models; consensus-informed approaches have been used in place of the leadership of a small and select group of mainly male charismatic decision-makers. But these “new” approaches have roots which can be found in attempts made during previous decades of uprising and revolt. Kuwasi Balagoon is a little-known former Panther whose name may have been uttered once for every thousand times Huey Newton or Bobby Seale were praised during the 2016 celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Oakland-headquartered Panthers. Though he was clear to some colleagues about his fluidity of political and personal practice, uniquely blending both revolutionary nationalist and anarchist beliefs, and he died in prison in 1986 due to complications from AIDS, he is held up as an important figure only among a very select group of radicals. Balagoon, in addition to being one of the team responsible for the liberation of Assata, was a member of the New York Panther 21. At age nineteen, Joan Bird was terrorized by New York police officers who were harassing two older men while the three were in a parked car. “They dragged me out,” she later testified, “and began to beat and stomp on me with heavy blackjacks, and beat and kicked me in the stomach, lungs, back, and handcuffed me.” Bird had just a few months earlier become a youthful recruit of Black Panther Party; a few months later she would be formally charged as a member of the New York Panther 21. Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor and Larry Mack traveled to Algeria to help set up the International Office of the Black Panther Party. They were early practitioners of true Pan-African solidarity: meeting and sharing resources with those struggling to free their lands of colonialism and neocolonialism from Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Vietnam, Palestine, and else-

Whirlwinds All Around Us

where. Successful freedom fighters from Algeria, Cuba, and China discussed strategies and tactics across geographic and linguistic lines and even occasionally fought together to help liberate one another’s territories. Cetewayo and Mack (along with Sekou Odinga, whose remembrances you will read about in this book) were not only part of the Panthers, they were members of the New York Panther 21. ** Exiled in Cuba, on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List with a $2 million bounty on her head, Assata Shakur wrote the words which are repeated nightly as a call to renewed struggle: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” As part of that duty, as part of our collective ability to learn how to win, we must know about Sundiata and Sekou and Dhoruba, about the pitfalls and lessons of Afeni and Jamal, Lumumba and Joan, Kuwasi and Cetewayo, and Larry and all the others. It is not merely that the case of the New York Panther 21 brought together an extraordinary group of exemplary individuals, deeply committed to the freedom of their people and of all people. It is not merely that the fiery militancy of those times forged a collective spirit and strategic approach which inspired millions and sent nervous shock waves down the corridors of state and imperial power. The story of the Panther 21 and its legacy provides essential truths which have remained largely hidden, even in the myriad of books and movies which make up the cottage industry of Black Panther nostalgia and mythology. These truths include a perspective on the need for clandestine operations during times of great repression. They include an emphasis on the role of the criminal/prison industrial complex which looks beyond the question of abolition toward a direct confrontation with existing legal structures and engagement with those on both sides of the wall. They include a unique and forgotten understanding of the ability to creatively provide both direct local services, such as the much-touted breakfast programs, while at the same time providing a concrete global vision and practice of revolutionary self-defense, fight back, and organization building. Beyoncé, Bette Midler, and other celebrities have recently referenced the significance of the Black Panthers, sometimes even calling for the release of the more than a dozen remaining Panther political prisoners. Like their celebrity counterparts of past generations, from John Lennon to Leonard

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

Bernstein and beyond, the importance of these spotlights is entirely what they represent in terms of mass organizing possibilities, not in terms of negotiable support for getting anyone out of jail—much less creating lasting radical change. Possibilities must be turned into realities through the steadfast, sometimes boring, often rewarding, occasionally fun work of making phone calls, writing educational materials, reaching out to people not yet in the know, holding meetings to help unify otherwise divergent perspectives. Once in a while it means working with folks we neither agree with nor like, but who can still play a helpful role in the struggles to free Sundiata Acoli, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Mutulu Shakur, Charles Sims Africa, Debbie Sims Africa, Delbert Orr Africa, Edward Goodman Africa, Merle Austin Africa, Michael Davis Africa, William Phillips Africa, Zolo Azania, Herman Bell, Jalil Muntaqim, Veronza Bowers, Kojo Bomani Sababu, Oso Blanco, Bill Dunne, Romaine Chip Fitzgerald, Patrice Lumumba Ford, David Gilbert, Robert Seth Hayes, Alvaro Luna Hernandez, Kamau Sadiki, Jaan Laaman, Mafundi Lake, Ruchell Cinque Magee, Tom Manning, Tarek Mehanna, Leonard Peltier, Ed Poindexter, Rev. Joy Powell, Gary Tyler, and others. For many of us, the publication of this book brings a special urgency to work harder for the release of Sundiata Acoli, member of the 21 who is an elder deserving of spending his eighth decade of life at home with his family. ** In 1969, when twenty-one leading members of the New York Black Panther Party were rounded up and indicted, taking risks for some meant continuing the work to “bring the war home”—as the first U.S. troops returned from Vietnam. This was in the context of an antiwar movement, which was holding moratoriums attracting millions, with Washington, DC–based demonstrations mobilizing upwards of 500,000 people. In the wake of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and the uprisings that followed, of the growing international popularity of “Black Power” and militancy on campuses and in communities, 1969 saw the inauguration of Richard Nixon as thirty-seventh president of the United States. The Chicago conspiracy trial began, bringing together eight codefendants accused of inciting riots that had taken place at the previous year’s Democratic National Convention. Ultimately it seemed that Chicago’s police force was more responsible for the riotous violence than any of those on trial. During the course of the trial, the judge ordered one of the eight, Black Panther cofounder Bobby Seale, bound and gagged in the

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courtroom—a fitting symbol to many of the treatment of vocal movement leaders. The year 1969 is widely remembered for the Woodstock Music Festival and Jimi Hendrix, Neal Armstrong’s “one giant leap for mankind” as Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and the release of the Beatles’ Abbey Road amid rumors of their splitting up. John and Yoko staged a “bed-in” for peace, and John returned his Order of the British Empire medal in protest of the war in Biafra, West Africa. Booker T and the MGs sang “Time Is Tight” and the Fifth Dimension sang “Let the Sunshine In (Age of Aquarius).” J-Lo and Jay-Z, Sean Combs and Ice Cube, Wyclef Jean and Terrence Howard were all born in 1969. As the year came to a close, in the wee hours of December 4, FBI undercover agent William O’Neal—who had infiltrated the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers and become bodyguard to Illinois Party chairman and Rainbow Coalition founder Fred Hampton—slipped Hampton a powerful sedative. While Hampton slept, officers of Cook County stormed his apartment, riddling him and fellow Panther Mark Clark with rounds of automatic gunfire. Two point-blank shots to the head of the man who was bringing together youth gangs and political activists, people of all races and ideologies, made certain that Chicago’s Panther leadership would be silenced—one way or another. In New York however, for 1969 at least, a different tactic was being used. Fighting for radical social change means taking real risks. Fifty years following the founding and demise of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, different economic, social, and political conditions prevail—even as many of the same baseline issues and underlying causes of conflict and injustice remain. An overextended empire seems in deep crisis, while attempts to stifle popular resistance at home are carried out by ever-more-militarized police forces and agents of repression. The imperial nature of the USA’s internal colonialism became clearer every day, as disenfranchised “communities of color” lived entirely separate and unequal lives even while a few Black millionaires thrived under a Black president. The U.S. presidential elections of 2016, if nothing else, showed a new level of dissatisfaction with the Washington status quo, whether evidenced by increased interest in socialistic “political revolution,” in right-wing populist or fascist movements, or in a woman-led continuation of the neoliberal agenda. Whatever one’s preference—including the growingly popular “none of the above”—resistance most certainly continues. **

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The radical historian’s job is not, in fact, to recount the people’s history in truth-telling form. As useful as that approach might sometimes be, the more urgent and revolutionary task of a people’s historian is to use one’s privileged positions to amplify, empower, uncover if necessary, and provide support for the voice of people themselves. Similarly, white folks struggling to be in accountable alliances with liberation movements must support anti–white supremacist, anti-imperialist, and pro–Black Power positions in many forms. Being good “interpreters” of other people’s oppression—like attempting to be facilitators of other people’s liberation—is ultimately a reactionary and ineffective position. Revolutionary 21st century solidarity must recognize that the oppressed of any race, ethnicity, gender, class, culture, and geographic space have much more wisdom about the nature of power and change than those of the oppressive castes (though privilege works overtime to ensure that most believe the opposite to be true). True solidarity understands that together, from different but aligned angles, we must deal strategic blows to the systems which devalue and commodify all people and things. Thus, this special book seeks to build authentic bridges between the past, present, and future—for all seeking truly revolutionary paths. The stories and voices of the Panther 21 resonate today because they boldly confronted their own tumultuous times with creativity, candor, and directness. This anthology brings together the classic texts from their collective autobiography with contemporary commentary from the surviving Panthers on lessons learned and directions for our times. Sister déqui kioni-sadiki adds the following piece that, along with this preface, attempts to set the stage for the ideas that follow. In addition to key new pieces by former Panther 21 members Sekou Odinga, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, and Jamal Joseph—each of whom did time behind bars even after the acquittal of the 21—we also have rarely seen and never-before-published materials from Panther 21 members Afeni Shakur, Ali Bey Hassan, and Kuwasi Balagoon, as well as some key writings of Sundiata Acoli and others. With the help of Bronx Panther Cyril Innis Jr. (“Bullwhip”), we have compiled a review of the post-acquittal lives of all of the 21; photographer and communications specialist David Fenton has shared with us some never-before-seen photos from the period. Photojournalist Stephen Shames, whose recent book Power to the People: The Black Panthers in Photographs spectacularly chronicles the images of those times, has gifted us with some images of the 21 that do not appear in his other work. Panther leader Bilal Sunni-Ali contributes a special chapter on 21 member Lumumba Shakur and in so doing casts a light on the entire complex history of Black Panthers in New York. Panther 21 member Shaba Om provides an

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inspiring introduction. And finally, former Panthers and still-incarcerated political prisoners Imam Jamil Al-Amin (aka H. Rap Brown) and Mumia Abu-Jamal graciously frame the book with their foreword and afterword, strengthening our efforts to build connections between the prison walls with the force of their mighty words. We would do well to listen carefully to them all. More than one hundred years have passed since Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey built the single largest organization in the history of Africans in the Americas. We would also do well to remember his admonitions, facing his own turbulent times while organizing in a period of great risk: If I die in Atlanta my work shall then only begin, but I shall live, in the physical or spiritual to see the day of Africa’s glory. When I am dead wrap the mantle of the Red, Black and Green around me, for in the new life I shall rise with God’s grace and blessing to lead the millions up the heights of triumph with the colors that you well know. Look for me in the whirlwind or the storm, look for me all around you, for, with God’s grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of Black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and by the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for liberty, freedom, and life.

Let us remember well that it is our duty not simply to struggle, but to win.

THE PAST CATCHES UP TO THE PRESENT déqui kioni-sadiki

Sankofa: go back into the past to build for the future That Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the first nationally recognized chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) is fairly well known in most progressive circles. Their October 1966 efforts centered on confronting police terror and the murder of Black people taking place in Oakland, California at that time. What isn’t nearly as well known is that almost from its inception, J. Edgar Hoover (the decades-long director of the FBI) was engaged in an undeclared and clandestine Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) war—on the BPP in particular, and on the whole of the Black Freedom struggle in general. Though the Panthers were specially targeted, COINTELPRO both included and began before FBI campaigns against Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, looking to criminalize the entire Black Liberation Movement with special attempts “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist . . . organizations and groups, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters.” That Hoover directed the FBI to destroy this revolutionary, youth-led BPP poses a number of questions: What was it about the BPP which so challenged the capitalist power structure that it had to be neutralized? 21

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

Could it be that, as a revolutionary organization, the BPP stood firmly on the principle that Black people have the right to struggle for justice, self-determination, and liberation? That those BPP principles were firmly rooted in the Black radical tradition of self-defense and armed resistance to white-on-Black violence and murder? Could it be that in a short span of time—in cities, towns, and states across the country—thousands of urban poor and working-class Black youth were becoming radicalized and joining the organization at a rate faster than anyone expected? Could it be that the BPP’s 10-Point Platform and Program provided poor and working-class Black people with free breakfast for children programs; free health clinics; sickle cell anemia testing; food pantries; clothing drives; elder, housing, and domestic violence assistance programs; welfare rights advocacy; cultural programs; and more—all while the capitalist power structure did nothing to help people? Could it be that the BPP articulated that the violence of poverty, hunger, homelessness, lack of decent health care, housing, and education, police terror and murder, and all manner of oppression endured by poor and working-class Black people were fundamentally a consequence and function of u.s. capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and white supremacy? Moreover, could it be that the BPP was able to politicize, inspire, awaken, and transform urban Black youth’s previously reactionary dysfunctional intercommunity violence and hostility into a revolutionary commitment and practice of serving and defending the material needs of other poor and working-class Black people? What is clear is that the deepest politics and practices of the BPP then— like its true history and legacy now—remains a source of tremendous power and potential. What is clear is that the idea that Black people, especially youth, would engage in the struggle to defend their right to justice, self-determination, and liberation—with arms if necessary—was so deeply troubling and threatening to the racist capitalist power structure that Hoover deemed the BPP “the greatest threat to the internal security” of the country. It is in this context that the FBI, CIA, u.s. Marshals, and New York City Police Department (NYPD)—with bulletproof vests, loaded shotguns, and a shoot-to-kill attitude—conducted an early morning raid of Panther homes and offices on April 2, 1969, to serve arrest warrants on Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor, Alex “Katara” McKeiver, Curtis “Doc” Powell, Sundiata Acoli (C. Squire), Ali Bey Hassan, Lonnie Epps, Lumumba Shakur, Lee Berry, Kwando Kinshasa, Shaba Om, Walter Johnson, Richard “Dhoruba” Moore, Afeni Shakur, Jamal “Eddie” Joseph, Joan Bird, Robert “Bob” Collier, Kuwasi Balagoon, and Richard Harris, as well as Sekou Odinga, Thomas Berry, and Larry

The Past Catches Up to the Present

Mack, who temporarily escaped capture. Eventually, charges were dropped against eight of them, leaving thirteen Panthers to stand trial: Joan Bird, Richard “Dhoruba” Moore, Robert “Bob” Collier, Ali Bey Hassan, Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor, Afeni Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, Lumumba Shakur, Kwando Kinshasa, Shaba Om, Abayama Katara (Alex McKeiver), Baba Odinga (Walter Johnson), and Dr. Curtis Powell. Kuwasi Balagoon and Richard Harris were already doing time in New Jersey. The New York Panther 21, as they came to be known, were charged with 186 counts of attempted arson, attempted murder, and conspiracy to blow up police precincts, schools, department stores, and the New York Botanical Garden. If convicted, each faced the possibility of 300+ years of political imprisonment. Almost the entire Harlem-Bronx chapter of the BPP, its NYC leadership, were included in the group. At the time, the trial against the 21 was the longest and most expensive trial in the history of New York City. It was never about justice or protecting people or places from these Panthers allegedly conspiring to harm or destroy them; and the trial was one that neither Hoover nor the powers that be had any intention of losing. As is the general case for poor and working-class Black people caught in the mangled web of an unjust criminal justice system, it was a cornucopia of injustice: perjured testimony by law enforcement, coercion of witnesses, prosecutorial misconduct, and a sitting judge ( John Murtagh) who made no attempt to conceal his contempt or disdain for the Panthers, Black resistance, and the team of movement attorneys. A visibly very pregnant Afeni Shakur functioned as her own extraordinarily effective, believable, compassionate, and capable pro se attorney. Gerald Lefcourt, William Crain, William Kunstler, Robert Bloom, Sanford Katz, Charles McKinney, and others served as the attorneys of record. The criminal charges levied against the 21 weren’t just about the individuals on trial. The trial and charges were among the war strategies Hoover used to criminalize the BPP and its membership all over the country. Then and now, the arrest, trial, and political imprisonment of the 21 stands as an indictment of a centuries-old hypocrisy that amerikkka holds the promise of life, liberty, and happiness for all people regardless of race, class, or religion. In fact, as government treatment of the Panthers makes clear, amerikkka has a long trajectory of criminalizing, suppressing, and repressing Black resistance. This trajectory extends from the state-sanctioned and violence-infested slave ships and plantations during the transatlantic slave trade and Middle Passage that first brought Africans to these shores to the impunity of white-on-black violence in the post-Reconstruction era, to the one hundred years of lynchings, the storm of mass arrests, water

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hoses, snarling police dogs, police beat-downs, and hate-filled white mobs of Jim Crow apartheid, to the present killing of Black mothers’ sons and daughters every twenty-six hours somewhere in amerikkka by white police, security guards, or vigilantes. The Black Panthers recognized this as both a historical and contemporary reality and responded appropriately in the language of self-defense and armed resistance. It is for this reason that Hoover was so doggedly determined to maim, murder, and defeat the BPP. He didn’t care how, or at what cost to life or limb, COINTELPRO was carried out; there were no legal, moral, or ethical boundaries he did not cross. All manner of overt and covert violence was used against the BPP: surveillance, illegal phone wiretapping, agents provocateurs, infiltration, coercion, fabrication of criminal charges, poisoning of the breakfast for children program, intercepting and forging mail to instigate internal and external dissension, distortions, and outright lies with the purpose of inciting hostility and violence between members and with other organizations. When all of that wasn’t enough, outright assassinations were fine with the FBI. The public was never supposed to know about COINTELPRO, or about Hoover’s mission to prevent: 1) the coalition of militant Black nationalist groups; 2) the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the masses; 3) Black militants from gaining respectability; and 4) the long-term growth and coalition of militant Black youth. Nor were they supposed to know Hoover had the complicit support and cooperation of local, state, and federal law enforcement, politicians, the capitalist ruling class, the criminal justice system, and corporate media to manufacture the climate of fear, hysteria, and “law and order” repression to combat the BPP and militant Black youth. Our knowledge of COINTELPRO’s existence is based mainly on an accidental discovery by a group of white radicals who secretly broke into a Media, Pennsylvania, FBI storage room to steal and burn draft cards. They stumbled upon the classified documents, turning those documents over to WIN Magazine, a biweekly associated with the War Resisters League, which dedicated its entire March 1972 issue to publishing the incriminating FBI documents. In those more radical times, in addition, the mass media was more willing to expose and spotlight the wide-scale government corruption. This eventually led to the Senate-based Church Committee hearings—named for its chair, Senator Warren Church— which ruled that COINTELPRO was an illegal operation that had committed acts violating the civil and constitutional rights of u.s. citizens. The sole outcome of those hearings was the immediate dismantling of COINTELPRO, but no other remedies or actions were taken to punish or

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hold accountable any law enforcement officer or agency for the literal crimes they committed against the revolutionaries, organizations, and movements of that time. Also, although other revolutionaries and organizations were targeted by Hoover and COINTELPRO, none suffered the degree of repression, state-sanctioned violence, and political imprisonment as the unsuspecting and underprepared Panthers and their families. In a six-year period, the BPP became target number one in Hoover’s vicious and unrelenting campaign of criminalization, dehumanization, distortion, demonization, and maligning that made police shoot-ins of Panther homes and offices a frequent occurrence. Across the country—even with unarmed bystanders present—dozens of Panthers were assassinated or injured. Dozens of others were driven underground or into exile, and dozens more were criminally charged, convicted, and sentenced to inordinately long terms of political imprisonment. In the decades since the Church Committee hearings there have been sporadic grassroots calls demanding public hearings to hold the government responsible for COINTELPRO’s illegal and violent acts. To date, there have been no formal investigations into the criminal convictions, and no widespread attempts to exonerate or release the dozens of Panthers and other revolutionaries targeted by COINTELPRO who are still held as political prisoners and prisoners of war (PP/POWs) in state and federal prisons across amerikkka. On May 13, 1971, the jury in the Panther 21 case returned with its verdict: “not guilty.” Although it was a tremendous victory for both the BPP and the Movement, at the same time the trial had exacted a heavy price. For two years, the NYC leadership were disappeared from the streets while BPP families and communities were disrupted and relationships and friendships became strained, with some dissolving under the duress. The work of serving and defending the people suffered. COINTELPRO had also succeeded in heightening and exploiting existing and growing contradictions between local, national, and international BPP cadre, chapters, and leadership, to the point that while fighting for their lives and freedom, the 21 were expelled by the Party’s Central Committee. COINTELPRO had instigated and manipulated internal and external seeds of dissension, hostility, distrust, and paranoia within the BPP that ultimately proved too difficult for the young cadre organization to recover from. The psychological, emotional, mental, physical, spiritual, and financial toll of coping with constant police attacks, friends being killed, children and parents harassed, dangerous and pernicious stereotyping, the loss and alienation of family members, the loss of jobs and housing, the arrests and fabrication of criminal charges requiring perpetual fundraising for

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lawyers and bail fees eventually left the BPP fractured and splintered, a shell of its short former existence. In the end, some members disappeared underground into the clandestine military unit of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Some returned to their previous livesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;feeling afraid, disillusioned, frustrated, disappointed, angry, and betrayed by the Party and movement they had come to love and committed their lives to. Still others found alternate means of serving the people. Fifty years later, members of the BPP are hidden in plain sight, suffering from the debilitating effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, casualties of COINTELPROâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s deadly war on the BPP. It has been four and a half decades since the trial of the 21, and the sociopolitical realities that exist today serve as a chilling reminder that the past has caught up to the present, that everything old has become new again, and that the more things change the more they stay the same. In 1966, rampant and unpunished police terror and murder of Black people led to the grassroots communal response of the BPP, with Black youth across the country being recruited in rapid-fire succession. In 2016, the persistence of unpunished police terror and murder of Black people has led to the grassroots communal response of Black Lives Matter, with once again much excitement from and recruitment of Black youth. Both are examples of organic formations that came into being as a result of the negligence and recalcitrance of a capitalist power structure, elected officials from the president of the United States to Congress, mayors, prosecutors, and grand and trial juries assiduously refusing to punish or hold police accountable for the murder of unarmed Black people. Most troubling of all is the fact that in the 1970s, the Church Committee felt able to call COINTELPRO an illegal operation; in 2016, government criminality and violent repression have surpassed the 1970s and been made legal by Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and the Military Defense Authorization Act. What this means for the new generation of Arab nationals, immigrants, and activists involved in a wide range of issues such as the environment and Ferguson, Baltimore, and the Black Lives Matter movement is that the criminalization, repression, demonization, arrests, dehumanization, subversion, and undermining of their ideas, principles, and organizing has not only continued but in some ways become commonplace. Criminal prosecutions, convictions, and political imprisonment imposed on the movement radicals and revolutionaries of the 1960s and â&#x20AC;&#x2122;70s is now being imposed on a new generation, with less interest or attention from the mainstream media. That most people have never heard of COINTELPRO

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or the war it waged against the BPP and the Black Liberation Movement isn’t surprising given the pervasive corporatization and commodification of history and academia. This status quo history-telling of the BPP has been fraught with revisionism, the culture of celebrity activism, and individualized Panther exceptionalism. The residual effects of COINTELPRO’s war on Black liberation continues not just in the political imprisonment of radicals and revolutionaries, but in the everyday reverberations which—over the past forty years—have led to the decimation, disintegration, and destruction of poor and working-class families and communities. The violent repression and political imprisonment of the BPP is symbolic of the notion that “when they come for you in the morning, they’ll be coming for me at night.” In the 1960s, the government waged war on Black liberation; twenty years later, a new draconian War on Drugs was waged on millions of poor and working-class Black men, womyn, and children. Forty years later, it’s a religious xenophobic War on Terror against Muslims and Arab nationals across the globe. The consequences and legacy of the onslaught against the Panther 21 are more than sophisticated government surveillance and disruption. That legacy continues daily as an unseen force assiduously manipulating, dictating, orchestrating, and controlling the entire Black sociopolitical landscape. It includes the lingering disorganization and sectarian disunity that plagues many activist circles and organizations today. Ultimately, what Hoover set out to accomplish has been achieved. We see this with the glaring absence of revolutionary Black nationalist groups and coalitions between organizations and activists, while a plethora of white-funded nonprofit or not-for-profit organizations exploit the conditions created by racist capitalist policies in urban Black communities. We see this in the lack of a cohesive transformative Black agenda to halt the systematic and institutionalized police genocide of Black people, and in the overabundance of Black mis-leadership, opportunists, self- or state-anointed Black spokespersons, and Black elected officials—always ready to serve the status quo, yet unwilling to challenge and confront the institutionalized oppression that cripples Black lives. We can see this in the marginalized, misleading, and mythologized history and legacy of the Panthers, in the treatment of self-defense, armed resistance, radical grassroots political perspectives mischaracterized as “violent,” “militant,” or “extremist.” Most perniciously, we see the overwhelming majority of misinformed and miseducated Black youth, crippled by ignorance and indifference about who they are, about the centuries and generations-old struggles waged on their behalf, distracted and obsessed by

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the whims of social media and technology, and consumed by hypercapitalist dreams of fame, fortune, and material possessions. This has affected all of us: unlike the days of old, neighbors hardly speak or interact with one another, children are left to fend for themselves, people have been conditioned to be afraid of not only the power structure but their neighbors, Black children, and everyone else. Each one of these wars has been waged on Black people in particular, but they have also targeted Brown, immigrant, Arab, and Muslim people, and have led to the further disintegration and destruction of poor and working-class families, kinship communities, and nations around the world. u.s. history is replete with perpetual wars meant to repress and control those who dare to struggle against the violence of capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and white supremacy. Unbeknownst to many, these wars have helped usher amerikkka into the police state we live in today. They have consolidated law enforcement into the most militarized police force in the world. It is against this backdrop that, radical or not, activists must heed the collective histories and herstories of the 21, the Black Panther Party, and past movements—to better understand and prepare themselves for the virulent state repression and potential political imprisonment that awaits them. For all these reasons and more, this updated version of Look for Me in the Whirlwind is a book whose time has come. Hoover is long gone, as is the covert version of the COINTELPRO. For the most part, the public’s perception and understanding of the BPP/BLA and what the organization represented within the Black freedom struggle is based upon an anti-Black, mythological, demonized, or criminalized idea of Black resistance—especially armed resistance. And while much has been written about the West Coast membership of the BPP, the East Coast stories have yet to be told. In many ways, the perspectives in this book will be an introduction for some, and a reintroduction for others, not only of the historic case of the 21 as members of the East Coast NYC chapter of the BPP, but about the who, what, and why regarding every level of the u.s.a.’s continuing war against the BPP/BLA and Black resistance movements. Like the original edition, it is presented in the first-person narrative of the once-younger members of the BPP. They are now becoming older, some departing this earthly realm, taking with them a litany of untold and valiant histories and herstories from one of the most significant revolutionary organizations and movements of the 20th century. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Jamal Joseph, Sundiata Acoli, Shaba Om, and Sekou Odinga, underground at the time of the original publication, are among the surviving members of the 21, and of the rarely presented East Coast membership

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of the BPP. They are survivors of Hoover’s war on the Black Liberation Movement. They offer here their fifty-year post-perspective on the significance of the 21, on Hoover’s COINTELPRO war, on the BPP/BLA and Black Liberation Movement, and on the still alarming rate of police genocide against unarmed Black men, womyn, and children. Here they expose the forty-year-old lies told about them and their comrades; here they make visible the often invisible existence of their fellow Panthers and dozens of other radicals and revolutionaries from the Movements of the 1960s and ’70s, held as PP/POWs in this purported land of “freedom and democracy.” Their collective histories as revolutionaries and former PP/POWs will counter the narrative of the BPP/BLA as anything but revolutionary—showing that they are nothing like the reactionary hate group or militant violent extremists conspiring to blow people up while they shopped for Easter outfits, as the case against the 21 tried to present them. With COINTELPRO waging war against the BPP, being a revolutionary was a matter of life and death. Surviving COINTELPRO has left deep scars, and means that to varying degrees every member of the BPP has gained, lost, and suffered from their involvement in the Black Liberation Movement. For Dhoruba, Jamal, and Sekou—and their families—this is especially true given that as former PP/POWs, they endured being underground and hunted down by law enforcement, prison isolation and separation from family, and torture and police beat-downs. What they share on these pages will challenge the vilification, denigration, and falsehoods that permeate any mainstream discussion about the BPP/BLA, their contributions to the Black Freedom struggle, and the presumptive denunciations of them and their comrades as “violent,” “cop killers,” “convicted felons,” or “domestic terrorists” for taking up arms to defend themselves, their families, community, and a nation of poor and working-class Black people against extreme state violence. As revolutionaries who stood up to this vile, hundreds-of-years-old system of oppression, repression, and suppression of Black people’s lives they can speak best to what they believe is their legacy in the movement for Black liberation. They tackle some of the questions most on people’s mind: Is there anything any of them would have done differently if given a chance? What challenges did they face then, and what challenges do they face now? What were the lessons learned? What has it meant to leave their still imprisoned comrades behind the wall thirty, twenty, or two years after their own release from prison? Most importantly, what messages of hope, resistance, and vision do they have for current and future generations of revolutionaries? It has now been more than forty-five years since the acquittal of the 21 and each of their lives has taken a different political, spiritual, personal, and

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professional path. Sundiata Acoli has spent well over forty years as a POW; he has been repeatedly denied parole based on pressure from the New Jersey law enforcement apparatus. Sekou Odinga was a POW thirty-four years until his release in November 2014. Dhoruba Bin Wahad served nineteen years as a POW until his conviction was overturned following a court appeal that released details of the COINTELPRO conspiracy against him. Jamal Joseph served five and a half years behind bars and is now a well-known filmmaker, college professor, and arts educator. The 21 and the BPP, like Malcolm X and so many Black folks before them, upheld the principle and tactic of self-defense and armed resistance, born out of the historical reality of Black people’s lived experiences resisting centuries and generations of white-on-Black terror, violence, and murder. Self-defense and armed resistance neither began nor ended with the BPP; both are a matter of Black survival in an amerikkka built on the violence and genocide against millions of indigenous people and the enslavement of millions of kidnapped Afrikans. Both are an ideology and practice firmly rooted in the Black radical tradition of justice, self-determination, and liberation— as aptly suggested by recent book titles such as This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible and We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. Self-defense and armed resistance are calls to action, to Black self-determination—to not be unarmed victims and witnesses of police genocide or any other form of white-on-Black terror and violence. For this reason, the BPP fighters were not and are not criminals, dangerous villains, “domestic terrorists,” “the greatest threat,” murderous people intent on killing police, or any of the other pejorative name-calling phrases ascribed to them by Hoover, police officers, judges, prison administrators, the corporate media, prison parole boards, history books, and Hollywood movies. And while all this is important, and a great deal of attention has been given to the Panther’s focus on the gun (with some also to the larger strategy of armed resistance), it isn’t the most significant aspect of the BPP legacy. The BPP’s primary objective was serving and defending the material needs of poor and working-class Black people. Keeping this in mind, the 21 and the BPP are Black heroes and sheroes, servants of the people, freedom fighters in the pantheon of the Black freedom struggle concerned about poor and working-class Black children living in a system that denied their humanity, dignity, justice, and most basic material needs. That millions of poor and working-class people of all races and ages—in cities, rural or suburban towns, and states across this country—now have access to free breakfast/lunch programs, free health clin-

The Past Catches Up to the Present

ics, food pantries, soup kitchens, a “patients’ bill of rights,” coats, shoes, and clothing drives—all this is a reflection of the work of the BPP. These survival programs initiated by the BPP made them targets of Hoover’s destructive, racist obsessions. The programs have since been co-opted by the u.s. government, to be administered as disempowering social service programs. Rather than speaking this truth to power about the legacy and work of the BPP, white amerikkka, reactionary academics, conservative political pundits, the corporate media, and bourgeois Blacks consistently demonize and misrepresent the role of the BPP as revolutionaries in the Black freedom struggle. These same forces clamor to glorify the highly fictitious “nonviolent” civil rights movement—which always had significant self-determination and self-defense elements built into it. Sadly, this dichotomy persists today. Whenever another unarmed Black man, womyn, or child has been murdered by the police, and Black people who must confront the reality of trying to live and breathe safely while Black in amerikkka make the obvious choice to rebel, we are all treated to the guardians of the status quo insisting on the need for calm, “nonviolent,” and “peaceful” protests. This hypocritical cry is antithetical to the historic realities of resistance and change; it is a patronizing and reactionary response to the contemporary paradox of state-sanctioned white-on-Black terror, violence, and murder. How are victims to remain calm, nonviolent, and peaceful in the face of intentional and unpunished violence and murder? In the 1960s, the BPP denounced the power structure’s sanctioning of police murder of Black people, and declared that Black lives matter in word and in deed. Today, that same Black lives matter declaration speaks just as profoundly to the souls of Black folk, because we still live in a nation of anti-Black laws and policies. That said, the reissue of the original book included here is a praise song to the 21 and to all those members of the BPP/BLA—inside and outside the prison walls, here and gone—who gave their hands, bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits to answer the Black freedom call; who woke up at 3:00 a.m. to cook breakfast for hungry children not their own; who escorted poor and working-class mothers into the bowels of housing court and welfare offices; who held slum landlords accountable for rats, roaches, and peeling paint; who faced down marshals attempting to evict mothers with children; who confronted drug dealers on street corners and playgrounds; who placed their bodies and lives in the police line of fire to stop them from shooting down other people’s sons and daughters; who served and defended poor people not because they were asked to but because necessity has always been the mother and fatherhood of Black resistance.

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

The BPP didn’t just inspire this nation of Black youth to join the people’s movement for liberation—it inspired nations of young freedom dreamers and freedom fighters the world over to do the same. In their lives and the lives of their families, being a Panther cadre meant wanting other people’s children to live in a better world. And this commitment has come at an incredibly heavy intergenerational cost. At the time of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the founding of the BPP, there could have been no more fitting a tribute than inclusion of the decades-long Panther political prisoners. The sacrifices which have been made are incredible, as is the ongoing commitment of Anthony “Jalil Muntaqim” Bottom, Veronza Bowers, Herman Bell, Sundiata Acoli, Robert Seth Hayes, Ed Poindexter, Kamau Sadiki, Imam Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown), Mutulu Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, Joseph Bowen, Russell Maroon Shoatz, and Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald. We must also never forget Assata Shakur (with a $2 million bounty, “terrorist” label), Pete O’Neal, Nehanda Abiodun, and others living in forced exile throughout Afrika, the Caribbean, and South America. We remember Albert “Nuh” Washington, Teddy “Jah” Heath, Bashir Hameed, Mondo we Langa, Kuwasi Balagoon, Warren Wells, Herman Wallace, and Abdullah Majid—martyred as POWs from the state-sanctioned medical neglect inside amerikkka’s prison death camps. Can we also think about the dozens of unnamed and long-forgotten members of the BPP, mercilessly shot down by killer cops in the streets across amerikkka? For them and their families, the moments of nostalgia, reunions of former comrades/revolutionaries not seen in years, commemorations, praise for and reveling in the courage, bravery, strengths, triumphs, and tenacity of the BPP is not so much an anticipated event as it is a painful reminder of the revolution that didn’t happen in their lifetime. It is a reminder of the deafening silence that pervades their loss, separation, trauma, pain, disappointment, and betrayal by all those claiming to love the BPP, to love Assata, but too busy to lift a finger for these freedom fighters. In honor of their lives, let there be an anniversary commemoration that softens the calloused apathy, disregard, dismissal, and indifference to their ongoing exile and political imprisonment, that brings more BPP voices, solidarity, dollars, and support into the work of building national and international campaigns to release these BPP PP/POWs from behind the prison walls. While the BPP/BLA of the 1960s and ’70s no longer exists, the spirit of the BPP lives on in the freedom dreams of Black folk—young and older— who rebel, agitate, organize, and resist. It doesn’t mean that the BPP is without fault or not in need of constructive critique. Certainly, the passage of time

The Past Catches Up to the Present

and history will absolve them of their so-called crimes and forgive them their mistakes, weaknesses, youthful ignorance, arrogance, and shortcomings. In the meantime, there are valuable lessons and insights to be learned by the example, resilience, strengths, triumphs, good, and not-so-good Panther practices, as they carried us forward in the Black freedom struggle. Whatever their shortcomings, both the 21 and the BPP in general represent the tie that binds our collective histories to the lives and legacies of Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, the Afrikan Blood Brotherhood, Republic of New Afrika, Revolutionary Action Movement, Rosa Parks, Deacons for Defense and Justice, Malcolm X, Robert and Mabel Williams, and a long list of unnamed Black men and womyn who recognized their human rights, political rights—rights as defined by international law to arm and defend themselves, family, community, and nation against the tyranny and oppression of white-on-Black violence, state-sanctioned or not—to every past, present, and future movement of radical Black resistance. In closing, the great revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara said revolutionaries are guided by great love for the people. And so it is with great love that this Look for Me in the Whirlwind edition goes out—as a love letter to a much older generation of Black men and womyn who joined the East and West Coast chapters of the BPP, fought and won the historic 21 case, sacrificed their lives on the battlefield of the Black Liberation Movement, unwillingly relinquished their freedom for ours, were murdered as PP/POWs in the dungeons of amerikkka’s prison death camps. It is a love letter to say “job well done.” A new generation must now seize the time to carry forward the Black struggle for justice, self-determination, and liberation. It is time to undo the far-reaching disinformation campaigns, with their oversimplification of the BPP’s role in the Black freedom struggle. In the simple and clear words of our beloved Abdullah Majid, a BLA political prisoner who died while incarcerated in 2016, “Let’s get to work.” In the meantime, asante sana to the New York Panther 21 and all those who resist, resist, resist—with the understanding that “freedom ain’t free.”

THE CASE OF SUNDIATA ACOLI

At eighty years of age, Sundiata Acoli—beloved Black liberation community elder, revered mathematician and former NASA employee, and close comrade of Assata Shakur—remains behind bars as one of the USA’s most-respected and least-known political prisoners. If contemporary tributes to the movements of the 1960s and ’70s are to mean anything; if apparent official commitments to restorative justice, reconciliation regarding past injustices, and a rule of law based on prevention and not revenge are to appear even slightly true; if this book is to be more than merely an academic exercise in nostalgia—then Sundiata Acoli must be set free. The movement to free Sundiata Acoli (and all U.S. political prisoners) must reach beyond a small, dedicated cadre of his family and friends. It must be based on more than simply a devotion to the politics and tactics which he and his comrades espoused. At eighty years of age, Sundiata Acoli’s continued imprisonment serves nothing other than to show—in a most direct, cruel, unusual, heinous, torturous, vindictive, and callous fashion—that the U.S. government and all those who support his current incarceration have not moved beyond the racist notions of Hoover, McCarthy, Jim Crow, or Old Dixie. Check out the important writings below by Sundiata, but also urgently check out his website and help build the movement for his freedom: sundiataacoli.org. Free Sundiata Now! 35

PAROLE 2016: RIDE AND DENIED Sundiata Acoli

This is a brief recap of my July 2016 parole hearing and denial. Almost two years prior, on September 29, 2014, the New Jersey Appellate Court ordered the New Jersey Parole Board to “expeditiously set conditions” for my parole. The parole board appealed the order on grounds that I had not undergone a hearing before the full parole board prior to securing the order for release. The New Jersey Supreme Court reversed the Appellate Court’s order and remanded the case to the full parole board for completion of the administrative process, which, for a convicted murderer like me, requires a full hearing before the parole board prior to securing release from incarceration. The process further requires that the victim be given the opportunity to address the board and to witness the full board’s interaction with the incarcerated murderer prior to his or her release. The Ride On June 6, 2016, I was transported by van from the federal prison in Maryland where I am “housed,” to Trenton, NJ, for a parole hearing—without my attorney present—before the full New Jersey State Parole Board. Upon arrival 37

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at New Jersey State Prison (NJSP), formerly Trenton State Prison, the driver of the van reported that he had “inadvertently” left my legal valise, containing all my legal material, at FCI Cumberland, Maryland. New Jersey and the FBI are caught in a time warp and can see me only as a cop killer, not the mathematician, computer analyst, intellectual, and humanitarian known and loved by the rest of the world, who registered voters in Mississippi in 1964, worked in Harlem with the Panthers, and has educated, mentored, and counseled countless younger prisoners over the years. My supporters say I am their hero. Imagine the term “killer cop” branding someone and burying him behind bars for life [the way the words “cop killer” are currently used —Ed.]. Most importantly, the valise contained my speech, “Why I Should Be Paroled,” cowritten by my dear comrade-daughter Fayemi Shakur and me, which I planned to deliver before the full board two days hence. I asked the driver to call R&D at FCI Cumberland and have them mail my valise overnight. NJSP immediately mug-shot me, gave me a Sundiata Acoli NJSP photo ID with my height reset from 5 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 5 inches by a spiteful guard, took me to lockdown, and cut off all communications and contact between me and the outside world: no incoming or outgoing mail, telephone, telegram, e-mail, visitor, money transfer, commissary, pen, paper, pencil, eraser, stamps, envelopes, towel, face cloth, or pillow. I told them I was from a medium security federal prison with no reason to be locked down. They ignored me. My attorney, Bruce Afran, was scheduled to visit me the next day; the cell was freezing cold; it was near sundown, so I called it a night and slept in my jumpsuit. Next day I arose at sunup, stiff-necked, showered and shook myself dry like a wet dog. I was given two-thirds of my normal medication dosage at FCI Cumberland and when I asked why, I was given no reason but simply told “No.” I told them I was from a medium security federal prison with no reason to be locked down. They ignored me. I was four-man escorted to Health Services for a Hep-C blood test and returned to my cell when I noticed they had written “PC” and “NO-CON” (i.e., “Protective Custody” and “NO CONTACT”) on my cell ID card. I told the escort sergeant that I was not PC, had not requested PC, and would sign any release form necessary to remove myself from that status. He said “No” and would not summon a lieutenant or the captain, so I resigned to put my attorney on the matter when we met. A prisoner overheard

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my complaint to the sergeant and sent me a stub pencil with no eraser. I was most thankful and sat down to write what I could remember of my “parole” speech when the guard called out that my attorney was here. Bruce’s father had died the previous week, but he was holding up well. He shared some youthful photos of his father and family with me, I expressed my condolences, and we got into the work. I told him they had lost my legal material, they have me in “total” lockdown, have a “PC” sign on my cell door, and have cut my meds to two-thirds of the dosage I received at FCI Cumberland. Bruce said he’d look into it and that meanwhile we needed to focus on the parole hearing tomorrow. Hearing Day On June 8, 2016, I arose and told the guard I had no clean clothes and no (safety) razor but I did have a parole hearing today and I was not going to the hearing unless I got a shower, razor, and clean clothes. He produced all three within the hour, except he substituted a barber for the razor. The U.S. Cold War with Cuba is thawing, whetting the appetite of New Jersey and the FBI to throw Assata Shakur back in a U.S. prison. They’ve labeled her a “terrorist”—she’s the first woman on the FBI’s terrorist list—and raised the price on her head to $2 million. That is a measure of the same officials’ attitude toward her codefendant, Sundiata Acoli. I noticed that my ankles had begun to swell from water accumulation, due most likely to the change in my medication. I was escorted to take a TB x-ray and returned to put the finishing touches on my speech when the guard said, “Parole board’s calling!” The hearing lasted from about 9:00 a.m. until about 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. It reached a new level of examination, cross-examination, and recrimination. Again, they questioned me primarily about the events on the turnpike with almost nothing about my many positive accomplishments. They also asked, “Aren’t you angry that they broke Assata out of prison instead of you?” My response was, “No, I don’t or wouldn’t wish prison on anyone.” At the end they again denied parole and went outside the guidelines to give me a longer than usual “hit” (time until next parole hearing). Since Blacks, others of color, and the oppressed are the overwhelming majority of people in prison, we need to seriously think about creating parole boards that mirror the people in prison, that is, “people’s parole boards.” My remaining two weeks at NJSP were spent in almost complete isolation from the outside world, except that on my last night there the Inmate Legal

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Association (ILA) sent me a free permit for an outgoing legal letter. By then my ankles were almost continually swollen from excess water buildup. I wrote my favorite attorney, and next morning they packed me out for the return trip to FCI Cumberland.

AN UPDATED HISTORY OF THE NEW AFRIKAN PRISON STRUGGLE Sundiata Acoli

Sundiata’s preface: This article was first written at the request of the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO) [in the late 1980s —Ed.]. Its original title was “The Rise and Development of the New Afrikan Liberation Struggle Behind the Walls.” It was first published, in 1992, as “A Brief History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle,” and then updated in 1998 to its present form. Although this work focuses almost exclusively on New Afrikan prisoners and their struggle, it is by no means intended to discount the many long heroic prison struggles and sacrifices by all other nationalities—the Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, Mexicans, whites, Asians, and others. Raphael Cancel Miranda, who led the work stoppage of the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, in 1972 in response to the beating of a Mexican prisoner, has been one of my heroes and role models since I first became aware of him long ago. The same can be said of Lolita Lebrón, with whom Assata Shakur did time at the Alderson Women’s Penitentiary—and of numerous other prisoners of different nationalities whom I’ve done time with and struggled together with during the long years of my imprisonment. There are so many deserving prisoners of all nationalities that it would extend this article indefinitely to include them all—and I did not feel justified in including some if I couldn’t include all. Nor did I feel presumptuous enough to write a prison history of other nationalities who are best suited to record their own history. My main intent is to chronicle the history of 41

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the New Afrikan prison struggle which, for too long, has been written by others who often took it upon themselves to read out of history those Black prisoners and Black prison organizations which did not conform to their preconceived notions of what was fit to include. The updated 1998 edition expressed appreciation to Zakiyyah Rashada, Nancy Kurshan, Steve Whitman, Joan McCarty, and Walee Shakur for providing prison source data. Any incorrect interpretations of the data are strictly mine. Also my warm gratitude to Mtumwa Iimani for her typing, editing, and helpful suggestions in the updating of the original version. The “New Afrikan liberation struggle behind the walls” refers to the struggle of Black prisoners, “behind the walls” of U.S. penal institutions, to gain liberation for ourselves, our people, and all oppressed people. We of the New Afrikan Independence Movement spell “Afrikan” with a “k” as an indicator of or cultural identification with the Afrikan continent and because Afrikan linguists originally used “k” to indicate the “c” sound in the English language. We use the term “New Afrikan” instead of Black, to define ourselves as an Afrikan people who have been forcibly transplanted to a new land and formed into a “New Afrikan” nation in North America. But our struggle behind the walls did not begin in America.

The 16th Century through the Civil War The Afrikan prison struggle began on the shores of Afrika, behind the walls of medieval pens that held captives for ships bound west into slavery. It continues today behind the walls of modern U.S. penitentiaries where all prisoners are held as legal slaves—a blatant violation of international law, as is the present U.S. policy of executing minors and the mentally impaired. The conception of prison ideology began to take form as far back as the reign of Louis XIV of France (1643–1715) when the Benedictine monk Mabillon wrote: “Penitents might be secluded in cells like those of Carthusian monks and there being employed in various sorts of labor.” In 1790, on April 5th, the Pennsylvania Quakers actualized this concept as the capstone of their fourteen-year struggle to reform Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Jail. No longer would corporal punishment be administered. Henceforth, prisoners would be locked away in their cells with a Bible and forced to do penitence in order to rehabilitate themselves. Thus was born the “penitentiary.” The first prison physically designed to achieve total isolation of each prisoner was the Eastern State Penitentiary, better known as Cherry Hill, in Philadelphia, constructed in 1829 with cells laid out so that no pris-

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

oner ever saw any person other than his guards. This “separate system” represented by Cherry Hill was being rivaled by an alternative, the “silent system,” which was designed specifically for exploiting mass convict labor. Under the latter system, prisoners were housed in solitary cells but worked together all day as an ideal source of cheap reliable labor, under rigorous enforcement of the rule that all convicts must maintain total silence. The model for this system was set up at Auburn, New York, in 1825, where they initiated the “lock step” so that guards could maintain strict control as the prisoners marched back and forth between their cells and their industrial workshops. By 1850, approximately 6,700 people were found in the nation’s newly emerging prison system. Almost none of the prisoners were Black. They were more valuable economically outside the prison system because there were other means of racial control. During this time most New Afrikan (Black) men, women, and children were already imprisoned for life on plantations as chattel slaves. Accordingly, the Afrikan struggle behind the walls was carried on primarily behind the walls of slave quarters through conspiracies, revolts, insurrections, arson, sabotage, work slowdowns, poisoning of the slave master, self-maiming, and runaways. If slaves were recaptured, they continued the struggle behind the walls of the local jails, many of which were first built to hold captured runaways. Later they were also used for local citizens. Even before the end of the Civil War, a new system had been emerging to take the place of the older form of slavery: the convict lease system. Thus, shortly after 1850 the imprisonment rate increased, then remained fairly stable with a rate of between 75 and 125 prisoners per 100,000 population. The Afrikan struggle continued primarily behind the slave quarters’ walls down through the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. This was a declaration issued by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the height of the Civil War. It declared the slaves free only in those states still in rebellion and had little actual liberating effect on the slaves in question. Their slave masters, still engaged in war against the Union, simply ignored the declaration and continued to hold their slaves in bondage. Some slave masters kept the declaration secret after the war ended following Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865. As a result, news of the Emancipation Proclamation did not reach slaves in Texas until June 19, 1865. This date, called “Juneteenth,” is celebrated annually by New Afrikans in Texas and outlying states as “Black Independence Day.”

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

Post–Civil War to the 20th Century Immediately after the Civil War and at the end of slavery, vast numbers of Black males were imprisoned for everything from not signing slave-like labor contracts with plantation owners to looking the “wrong” way at some white person or for some similar “petty crime.” Any “transgression” perceived by whites to be of a more serious nature was normally dealt with on the spot with a gun or rope—provided the Black was outnumbered and out-armed. “Black-on-Black” crime was then, as now, considered to be “petty crime” by the U.S. justice system. But petty or not, upon arrest most New Afrikans were given long, harsh sentences at hard labor. Within five years after the end of the Civil War, the Black percentages of the prison population went from close to zero to 33 percent. Many of these prisoners were hired out to whites at less than slave wages. This new convict-lease system appeared to have great advantages for the landowners: they did not own the convicts, and hence could afford to work them to death. (The movie Gone with the Wind actually uses this new form to glorify the older system by comparison.) The president of the Board of Dawson discovered that in 1869 the death rate among leased Alabama Black convicts was 41 percent. Some restraints were obviously necessary; Mississippi managed to reduce its annual death rate for leased Black convicts between 1882 and 1887 to a mere 15 percent. Overnight prisons had become the new slave quarters for many New Afrikans. Likewise, the Afrikan prison struggle changed from a struggle behind the walls of slave quarters to a struggle behind the walls of county workhouses, chain gang camps, and the plantations and factories that used leased convicts as slave laborers.

The 20th Century through World War II From 1910 through 1950, Blacks made up 23 to 34 percent of the prisoners in the U.S. prison system. Most people conditioned by prison movies like The Defiant Ones (starring Sidney Poitier, a Black, and Tony Curtis, a white) or I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (starring Paul Muni, a white in an integrated chain gang), or Cool Hand Luke (starring Paul Newman, a white, in a southern chain gang) erroneously assume that earlier U.S. prison populations were basically integrated. This is not so. The U.S. was a segregated society prior to 1950, including the prisons—even the northern ones. Roger Benton’s 1936 overview of Louisiana’s Angola prison and its historical background states:

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

There were actually six camps at Angola, five of which were composed of men and one for women. Only in the women’s camp were whites and coloreds mixed. Camps A, B, C, and D were all colored and constituted by far the bulk of the population, furnishing the state with the cheap convict labor so sorely needed to raise and harvest the mammoth sugar cane crop necessary to satisfy the hungry maws of the gigantic and profitable grinding and refining plant. Once you saw the operation of the plant—the terrific busyness of everybody during grinding time—once you learned what the plant meant to the state in dollars-and-cents profit, you understood why it was so easy to convict and imprison a Negro in the South, and gained a new understanding of the whole basis for the subjugation of the Negroes. Although only 40 percent of the entire population of Louisiana at this time was colored, 83 percent of the prison population was made up of Negroes.

Blacks were always, at least from the time of Emancipation, the majority population in the southern state prisons. But elsewhere the early populations of the more well-known or “mainline” state and federal prisons—Attica, Auburn, Alcatraz, and Atlanta—were predominantly white and male. Whenever New Afrikans were sent to these “mainline” prisons they found themselves grossly outnumbered, relegated to the back of the lines, to separate lines, or to no lines at all. They were often denied outright what meager amenities existed within the prisons. Racism was rampant. New Afrikans were racially suppressed by both white prisoners and guards. All of the guards were white; there were no Black guards or prison officials at the time. In the period between the Civil War and World War II, the forms of convict labor spilled over and intermingled with “free” labor. Thus, we find Virginia convicts being worked by a canal company. Tennessee worked a part of its convicts within the prison walls, a part on farms, and the rest were leased to railway companies and coal mines. North Carolina and South Carolina employed a portion of their convicts within the walls. The rest were scattered under various lessees. Much of the tunneling of the Western Carolina Railroad through the Blue Ridge was accomplished by convict labor. Georgia convicts were leased to lumber camps and brickyards. Alabama employed hers in railroad building, in mines, and sawmills. Mississippi convicts were leased to railway contractors and planters. Until 1883, the lessees of Texas convicts employed a portion of them in a cotton mill and at other times within the walls of the penitentiary, and placed the remainder in railway construction camps. Arkansas convicts were leased to plantation owners and coal mines. In

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Florida, the majority of the convicts were leased to turpentine farms. A smaller number were employed in phosphate mines. The Afrikan prisoners continued to struggle behind the walls of these segregated convict-lease systems, county workhouses, chain gang camps, and state and federal prisons, yet prison conditions for them remained much the same through World War II. Inside conditions accurately reflected conditions in the larger society outside the walls, except by then the state’s electric chair had mostly supplanted the lynch mob’s rope.

Post–World War II to the Civil Rights Era Things began to change in the wake of World War II. Four factors flowing together ushered in these changes. They were the ghetto population explosion, the drug influx, the emergence of independent Afrikan nations, and the civil rights movement. The Ghetto Population Explosion Plentiful jobs during the war, coupled with a severe shortage of white workers, caused U.S. war industries to hire New Afrikans in droves. Southern New Afrikans poured north to fill these unheard of job opportunities, and the already crowded ghetto populations mushroomed. Drug Influx New Afrikan soldiers fought during the war to preserve European democracies. They returned home eager to join the fight to make segregated America democratic too. But the U.S. had witnessed Marcus Garvey organize similar sentiments following World War I into one of the greatest Black movements in the western hemisphere. This time the U.S. was more prepared to contain the new and expected New Afrikan assertiveness. Their weapon was “King Heroin.” The U.S. employed the services of the Mafia during World War II to gather intelligence in Italy to defeat fascist Mussolini. Before the war, Mussolini embarked on a major campaign against the Mafia, which enraged the group’s leaders. (Fascism was a big Mafia itself so it couldn’t allow another Mafia to exist.) Mussolini’s activities turned Mafiosi into vigorous anti-fascists, and the American government cooperated with the Mafia both in the United States and in Sicily. In the eyes of many Sicilians, the United States helped restore the Mafia’s lost power. The Americans had to win the war, so they couldn’t pay much attention to these things. “They thought the Mafia could help them,

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

and perhaps they did,” said Leonardo Sciascia, perhaps the best-known living Sicilian novelist and student of the Mafia. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), helped to commute Lucky Luciano’s sentence in federal prison and arrange for his repatriation to Sicily. Luciano was among the top dons in the Mafia syndicate and the leading organizer of prostitution and drug trafficking. The OSS knew that Luciano had excellent ties to the Sicilian Mafia and wanted the support of that organization for the Allied landing in Sicily in 1943. When Luciano left the U.S., numerous politicians and Mafia dons gathered together at the Brooklyn docks to wave him goodbye in what was the first of many occasions that international drug dealers were recruited by the U.S. government to advance its foreign policy interests. After the war, in return for “services rendered,” the U.S. looked the other way as the Mafia flooded the major U.S. ghettos with heroin. Within six years after World War II, due to the Mafia’s marketing strategy, over 100,000 people were addicts, many of them Black. The Emergence of Independent Afrikan Nations Afrikans from Afrika, having fought to save European independence, returned to the Afrikan continent and began fighting for the independence of their own colonized nations. Rather than fight losing Afrikan colonial wars, most European nations opted to grant “phased” independence to their Afrikan colonies. The U.S. now faced the prospect of thousands of Afrikan diplomatic personnel, their staffs and families coming to the UN and wandering into a minefield of racial incidents, particularly on state visits to the rigidly segregated capital, Washington, D.C. That alone could push each newly emerging independent Afrikan nation into the socialist column. To counteract this possibility, the U.S. decided to desegregate. As a result, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared school segregation illegal. In its landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case, which heralded the beginning of the end of official segregation in the United States, the Supreme Court had been made fully aware of the relations between America’s domestic policies and her foreign policy interest by the federal government’s amicus curiae (i.e., friend of the court) brief, which read: It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed . . . [for] discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon

Look for Me in the Whirlwind our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.

Malcolm X provides similar insight into the reasoning behind the U.S. decision to desegregate. During his February 16, 1965, speech at Corn Hill Methodist Church in Rochester, New York, he said: From 1954 to 1964 can be easily looked upon as the era of the emerging African state. And as the African state emerged . . . [w]hat effect did it have on the Black American? When he saw the Black man on the [African] continent taking a stand, it made him become filled with the desire to also take a stand. . . . Just as [the rulers of the U.S.] had to change their approach with our people on this continent. As they used tokenism . . . on the African continent . . . they began to do the same thing with us here in the States: . . . tokenism. . . . Every move they made was a token move. . . . They came up with a Supreme Court desegregation decision that they haven’t put into practice yet, not even in Rochester much less in Mississippi. [Applause.]

Origin of the Civil Rights Movement On December 1, 1955, Ms. Rosa Parks defied Montgomery, Alabama’s bus segregation laws by refusing to give her seat to a white man. Her subsequent arrest and the ensuing mass bus boycott by the Montgomery New Afrikan community kicked off the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr., a young college-educated Baptist minister, was chosen to coordinate and lead this boycott primarily because he was a new arrival in town, intelligent, respected, and had not accumulated a list of grudge enemies as had the old guard. His selection for leadership catapulted him upon the stage of history. The 381-day boycott toppled Montgomery’s bus segregation codes. Reverend Joseph E. Lowery was part of a group of young activist ministers who had begun to test segregated public transportation laws, in addition to Martin Luther King Jr.—and Ralph Abernathy in Montgomery, Alabama; Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, Alabama; Theodore “T.J.” Jemison in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Charles K. Steel in Tallahassee, Florida. “The earliest boycotts were in Baton Rouge and Tallahassee, but they were unsuccessful,” says Lowery. “We used to meet monthly in Montgomery to share our pain.” After the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, the ministers met in New Orleans in February 1957 and formed the Southern Christian Lead-

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

ership Conference (SCLC), with Martin Luther King Jr. later nominated as chairman of the board. A month later, in March 1957, Ghana became the first of a string of sub-Saharan Afrikan nations to be granted independence. As northern discrimination, bulging ghettos, and the drug influx were setting off a rise in New Afrikan numbers behind the walls, southern segregation, the emergence of Independent Afrikan nations, and the resulting civil rights movement provided those increasing numbers with the general political agenda: equality and antidiscrimination.

Civil Rights through the Black Power Era Religious Struggles in Prison Meanwhile, behind the walls, smart segments of New Afrikans began rejecting Western Christianity. They turned to Islam as preached by Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI) and by Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple of America (MST). The NOI preached that Islam was the true religion of Black people, that Blacks were the original people on earth, and that Blacks in America were a nation needing land and independence. The MST preached that the Asiatic Black people in America must proclaim their nationality as members of the ancient Moors of Northern Africa. These new religions produced significant success rates in helping New Afrikan prisoners rehabilitate themselves by instilling them with a newfound sense of pride, dignity, piety, and industriousness. Yet these religions seemed strange and thus threatening to prison officials. They moved forthwith to suppress these religions, and many early Muslims were viciously persecuted, beaten, and even killed for practicing their beliefs. The Muslims fought back fiercely. Civil Rights Struggles in Prison Like American society, the prisons were rigidly segregated. New Afrikans were relegated to perform the heaviest and dirtiest jobs—farm work, laundry work, dishwashing, garbage disposal—and were restricted from jobs as clerks, straw bosses, electricians, or any position traditionally reserved for white prisoners. Similar discriminatory rules applied to all other areas of prison life. New Afrikans were restricted to live in certain cell blocks or tiers, eat in certain areas of the mess hall, and sit in the back at the movies, TV room, and other recreational facilities. Influenced by the anti-discrimination aspect of the civil rights movement, a growing number of New Afrikans behind the walls began stepping up their struggle against discrimination in prison. Audacious New Afrikans began

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violating longstanding segregation codes by sitting in the front seats at the movies, mess hall, or TV areas—and more than a few died from shanks in the back. Others gave as good as they got, and better. Additionally, New Afrikans began contesting discriminatory job and housing policies and other biased conditions. Many were set up for attack and sent to the hole for years, or worse. Those who were viewed as leaders were dealt with most harshly. Most of this violence came from prison officials and white prisoners protecting their privileged positions; other violence came from New Afrikans and Muslims protecting their lives, taking stands and fighting back. From these silent, unheralded battles against racial and religious discrimination in prisons emerged the New Afrikan liberation struggle behind the walls during the civil rights era of the 1950s. Eventually the courts, influenced by the “equality/anti-discrimination” aspect of the civil rights movement, would rule that prisons must recognize the Muslims’ religion on an “equal” footing with other accepted religions, and that prison racial discrimination codes must be outlawed.

Black Power through the Black Liberation Era As the civil rights movement advanced into the ’60s, New Afrikan college students waded into the struggle with innovative lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration projects. On April 15, 1960, a student conference was called under the auspices of Ms. Ella Baker, a field worker for the SCLC. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed during this period to coordinate and instruct student volunteers in nonviolent methods of organizing voter registration projects and other civil rights work. These energetic young students, and the youth in general, served as the foot soldiers of the movement. They provided indispensable services, support, and protection to local community leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Septima Clark, Bob Moses, Amzie Moore, Daisy Bates, and other heroines and heroes of the civil rights movement. Although they met with measured success; white racist atrocities mounted daily on defenseless civil rights workers. Young New Afrikans in general began to grow increasingly disenchanted with the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King. Many began to look increasingly toward Malcolm X, the fiery young minister of NOI Temple No. 7 in Harlem, New York. He called for “self-defense, freedom by any means necessary, and land and independence.” As Malcolm Little, he had been introduced to the NOI doctrine while imprisoned in Massachusetts. Upon release, he traveled to Detroit to meet Elijah Muhammad, converted to Islam, and was

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

given the surname “X” to replace his discarded slave-master’s name. The X symbolized his original surname lost to history when his fore-parents were kidnapped from Afrika, stripped of their names, language, and identity, and enslaved in the Americas. As Malcolm X he became one of Elijah Muhammad’s most dedicated disciples and rose to National Minister and spokesperson for the NOI. His keen intellect, incorruptible integrity, staunch courage, clear resonant oratory, sharp debating skills, and superb organizing abilities soon brought the NOI to a position of prominence within the Black ghetto colonies across the U.S. Origin of the Revolutionary Action Movement During the fall of 1961, an off-campus chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) formed at Ohio’s Central State College, called Challenge. Challenge was a black radical formation having no basic ideology. Part of its membership was students who had been expelled from southern schools for sit-in demonstrations. Others were students who had taken freedom rides or from the North, some of whom had been members of the NOI and Afrikan nationalist organizations. Challenge’s main emphasis was struggling for more students’ rights on campus and bringing a Black political awareness to the student body. In the yearlong battle with the college’s administration over student rights, members of Challenge became more radicalized. Challenge members attended student conferences in the South and participated in demonstrations in the North. Donald Freeman, a Black student at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University maintained correspondence with Challenge’s cadre discussing the ideological aspects of the civil rights movement. In the spring of 1962, Studies on the Left, a radical quarterly, published Harold Cruse’s article “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American.” Freeman wrote a letter to Challenge cadre telling them to seriously study the article. He also said Black radicals elsewhere were studying the article and that a movement had to be created in the North similar to the NOI, using the tactics of SNCC but outside of the NAACP and CORE. After much discussion, the cadre decided to form a broad coalition to take over student government at Central State. Meetings were held with representatives from each class, fraternity, and sorority. A slate was drafted and a name for the party was selected. It was called “RAM,” later to be known as the Revolutionary Action Movement. The Challenge cadre met and decided to dissolve itself into RAM and become the RAM leadership. RAM won all student government offices. After the election, the inner RAM core discussed what to do next. Some said that all that could be done at Central State had

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already been done, while other disagreed. Some of the inner core decided to stay at Central State and run the student government, while a few decided to return to their communities and attempt to organize around Freeman’s basic outline. Two of the returning students were Wanda Marshall and Max Stanford, now named Akbar Muhammad Ahmad, who transplanted RAM from Cleveland to the ghettos of Philadelphia, New York, and other urban areas. The March on Washington In 1963, Malcolm X openly called the March on Washington a farce. He explained that the desire for a mass march on the nation’s capital originally sprang from the Black grassroots: the average Black man and woman in the streets. It was their way of demonstrating a mass Black demand for jobs and freedom. As momentum grew for the march, President Kennedy called a meeting of the leaders of the six largest civil rights organizations, dubbed the “Big Six”—NAACP, SCLC, CORE, National Urban League (NUL), SNCC, and the National Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (NBSCP)—asking them to stop the proposed march. They answered that they couldn’t stop it because they weren’t leading it, didn’t start it, and that it had sprung from the masses of Black people. Since they weren’t leading the march, the president decided to make them the leaders by distributing huge sums of money to each of the Big Six, publicizing their leading roles in the mass media, and providing them with a script to follow regarding the staging of the event. The script planned the march down to the smallest detail. Malcolm explained that government officials told the Big Six what time to begin the march, where to march, who could speak at the march and who could not, generally what could be said and what could not, what signs to carry, where to go to the toilets (provided by the government), and what time to end—and most of the 200,000 marchers were never the wiser. By then SNCC’s membership was also criticizing the march as too moderate and decrying the violence sweeping the South. History ultimately proved Malcolm’s claim of “farce” correct, through books published by participants in the planning of the march and through exposure of government documents on the matter. Origin of the Five Percenters Clarence 13X (Clarence Smith) was expelled from Harlem’s Nation of Islam Temple No. 7 in 1963 because he wouldn’t conform to NOI practices. He frequently associated with the numerous street gangs that abounded in New York City at the time and felt that the NOI didn’t put enough effort into recruiting

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

among these street gangs and other wayward youth. By ’64 he had established his own “movement” called the “Five Percenters.” The name comes from their belief that 85 percent of Black people are like cattle, who continue to eat the poisoned animal (the pig), are blind to the truth of God, and continue to give their allegiance to people who don’t have their best interests at heart; that 10 percent of Black people are bloodsuckers—the politicians, preachers, and other parasitic individuals who get rich off the labor and ignorance of the docile exploited 85 percent; and that the remaining 5 percent are the poor righteous teachers of freedom, justice, and equality who know the truth of the “Black” God and are not deceived by the practices of the bloodsucking 10 percent. The Five Percenters movement spread throughout the New York State prison system and the Black ghettos of the New York metropolitan area. Meanwhile the New York City Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services (BSS), who kept their eyes on radicals and dissidents, put Clarence 13X at the top of their list of “Black militants.” Origin of the New World Nation of Islam In December 1965, Newark’s Mayor Hugh Addonizio witnessed a getaway car pulling away from a bank robbery and ordered his chauffeur to follow with siren blasting. The fleeing robbers crashed into a telephone pole, sprang from their car and fired a shot through the mayor’s windshield. He screeched to a halt, and police cars racing to the scene captured Muhammad Ali Hassan (known as Albert Dickens) and James Washington. Both were regular attendees of Newark’s NOI Temple No. 25, headed by Minister James 3X Shabazz. Ali Hassan and Washington were members of the New World Nation of Islam (NWI). Ali Hassan, its leader and Supreme Field Commander, dates the birth of the New World Nation of Islam as February 26, 1960. He states that on that date Elijah Muhammad authorized the New World Nation of Islam under the leadership of Field Supreme Minister Fard Savior and declared that the Field Minister had authority over all the NOI Muslims. Ali Hassan and Washington were convicted for the bank robbery and sent to Trenton State Prison. The NWI’s belief in the supreme authority of Fard Savior was rejected by NOI Minister Shabazz, and thereafter an uneasy peace prevailed between the followers of Shabazz, who remained in control of Newark’s NOI Temple No. 25, and the followers the NWI who sought to gain control of it. Meanwhile, Ali Hassan published a book titled Uncle Yah Yah and ran the NWI from his prison cell. Along with the more established and influential NOI, the influence of the NWI spread throughout the New Jersey state prison system and the metropolitan Jersey ghettos. The NWI began setting up food

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co-ops, barbershops, houses to teach Islam, and printing presses; and purchased land in South Carolina, all in furtherance of creating an independent Black nation.

The Black Liberation Era Black Power James Meredith was shot on June 6, 1966, while on his march against fear in Mississippi. A civil rights group decided to complete the march. One night during a rally connected to the march, SNCC organizer Willie Ricks (“Mukassa”) raised the cry of “Black Power.” Stokely Carmichael, SNCC chairman, repeated the slogan the next night at a mass rally and the Black Power movement began to sweep the country. Black Panthers Usher in the Black Liberation Movement Midstride the ’60s, on February 21, 1965, Malcolm was assassinated, but his star continued to rise and his seeds fell on fertile soil. The following year, October 1966, in Oakland, California, Huey P. Newton and a handful of armed youths founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense on principles that Malcolm had preached—and the Black Liberation Movement (BLM) was born. Subsequently the name was shortened to the Black Panther Party (BPP) and a 10-Point Program was created which stated: 1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community. 2. We want full employment for our people. 3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black community. 4. We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings. 5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society. 6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service. 7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people. 8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails. 9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States. 10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations– supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the Black colony in which only Black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of Black people as to their national destiny. (See full 10-Point Program later in this volume, pp. 603–606) The Panthers established numerous programs to serve the Oakland ghetto—free breakfasts for children, free health care, free daycare, and free political education classes. The program that riveted the ghetto’s attention was their campaign to “stop police murder of and brutality against Blacks.” Huey, a community college pre-law student, discovered that it was legal for citizens to openly carry arms in California. With that assurance, the Black Panther Party began armed car patrols of the police cruisers that patrolled Oakland’s Black colony. When a cruiser stopped to make an arrest, the Panther car stopped. They fanned out around the scene, arms at the ready, and observed, tape recorded, and recommended a lawyer to the arrest victim. It didn’t take long for the police to retaliate. They confronted Huey late one night near his home. Gunfire erupted, leaving Huey critically wounded, a policeman dead, and another wounded. The Panthers and the Oakland/Bay community responded with a massive campaign to save Huey from the gas chamber. The California Senate began a hearing to rescind the law permitting citizens to openly carry arms within city limits. The Panthers staged an armed demonstration during the hearing at the Sacramento Capitol to protest the Senate’s action, which gained national publicity. That publicity, together with the Panthers’ philosophy of revolutionary nationalism and self-defense combined with the “Free Huey” campaign, catapulted the BPP to nationwide prominence. But it was not without cost. On August 25, 1967, J. Edgar Hoover issued his infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) memorandum, which directed the FBI (and local police officials) to disrupt specified Black organizations and neutralize their leaders so as to prevent “the rise of a Black messiah.” Attacks Increase on Revolutionaries The Panthers rolled eastward, establishing offices in each major northern ghetto. As they went, they set up revolutionary programs in each community that were geared to provide community control of schools, tenant control of

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slum housing, free breakfast for schoolchildren, free health care, daycare, and legal clinics, and free political education classes for the community. They also initiated campaigns to drive dope pushers and drugs from the community, and campaigns to stop police murder and brutalization of Blacks. As they went about the community organizing these various programs they were frequently confronted, attacked, or arrested by the police, and some were even killed during these encounters. Other revolutionary organizers suffered similar entrapments. The Revolutionary Action Movement’s Herman Ferguson and Max Stanford were arrested in 1967 on spurious charges of conspiring to kill civil rights leaders. In the same year the poet and playwright Amiri Baraka—aka LeRoi Jones—was arrested for transporting weapons in a van during the Newark riots and did a brief stint in Trenton State Prison until a successful appeal overturned his conviction. SNCC’s Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, and other orators were constantly threatened or charged with “inciting to riot” as they crisscrossed the country speaking to mass audiences. Congress passed “Rap Brown laws” to deter speakers from crossing state lines to address mass audiences lest a disturbance break out leaving them vulnerable to federal charges and imprisonment. And numerous revolutionary organizers and orators were being imprisoned. This initial flow of revolutionaries into the jails and prisons began to spread a revolutionary nationalist buzz through New Afrikans behind the walls. New Afrikan prisoners were also influenced by the domestic revolutionary atmosphere and the liberation struggles in Afrika, Asia, and South America. Small groups began studying on their own, or in collectives, the works of Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, The Black Panther newspaper, The Militant newspaper, contemporary national liberation struggle leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Tse-tung, plus Marx, Lenin, and Bakunin too. The numbers of New Afrikan and Third World prisoners increased while the number of white prisoners decreased throughout U.S. prisons. Under this onslaught of rising national liberation consciousness, increased percentages of New Afrikan and Third World prisoners, and decreased numbers of white prisoners, the last of the prisons’ overt segregation policies fell by the wayside. The New Afrikan Independence Movement The seeds of Malcolm took further root on March 29, 1968. On that date the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA) was founded at a convention held at the Black-owned Twenty Grand Motel in Detroit. Over five hundred grassroots activists came together to issue a Declaration of

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

Independence on behalf of the oppressed Black nation inside North America, and the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM) was born. Since then Blacks desiring an independent Black nation have referred to themselves and other Blacks in the U.S. as “New Afrikans.” That same month, March ’68, during Martin Luther King’s march in Memphis, angry youths on the fringes of the march broke away and began breaking store windows, looting, and firebombing. A sixteen-year-old-boy was killed and fifty people were injured in the ensuing violence. This left Martin profoundly shaken and questioning whether his philosophy was still able to hold the youth to a nonviolent commitment. On April 4th, he returned to Memphis, seeking the answer through one more march, and found an assassin’s bullet. Ghettos exploded in flames one after another across the face of America. The philosophy of Black liberation surged to the forefront among the youth. But not the youth alone; following a series of police provocations in Cleveland, on July 23, 1968, New Libya Movement activists there set an ambush that killed several policemen. A “fortyish” Ahmed Evans was convicted of the killings and died of “cancer” in prison ten years later. More CIA dope surged into the ghettos from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Revolutionaries stepped up their organizing activities on both sides of the walls. Behind the walls the New Afrikan percentage steadily increased. The Street Gangs There were numerous Black, white, Puerto Ricans, and Asian street organizations, i.e., “gangs,” in New York City during the 1950s. Among the more notorious Black street gangs of the era were the Chaplains, Bishops, Sinners, and Corsair Lords; also there were the equally violent Puerto Rican Dragons. All warred against each other and any gangs that crossed their paths. By the 1960s, the post–World War II heroin influx had taken its toll. Most of the New York street gangs faded away. Their youthful members had succumbed to drugs, either through death by overdose, by ceasing gang activities in order to pursue full-time criminal activities to feed their drug habits, or because they were in prison for drug crimes or youth-gang assaults and killings. Lumumba Shakur, warlord of the Bishops, and Sekou Odinga, leader of the Sinners, were two such youths who had been sent to the reformatory for youth-gang assaults. They graduated up through the “Gladiator Prisons”— Woodburn and Comstock—to mainline Attica, became politicized by the stark brutal racism in each prison, and at age twenty-one were spit back upon the streets. When the Panthers reached the East Coast in 1968, Lumumba and

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Sekou were among the first youths to sign up. Lumumba opened the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party as its Defense Captain. Sekou opened the Queens chapter as a lieutenant and later transferred to Harlem to co-head it with his boyhood pal, Lumumba. Origin of the Gangster Disciples Street Gang The Gangster Disciples were founded in the 1960s in Chicago by the late David Barksdale, known historically in gang circles as “King David,” under the name “Black Disciples.” The group’s name was later changed to “Black Gangster Disciples,” and later still the name was shortened to “Gangster Disciples,” or simply “GD.” Its gang colors are blue and black. COINTELPRO Attacks In 1969, COINTELPRO launched its main attack on the Black Liberation Movement in earnest. It began with the mass arrest of Lumumba Shakur and the New York Panther 21. It followed with a series of military raids on Black Panther Party offices in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Haven, Jersey City, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, Omaha, Sacramento, and San Diego, and was capped off with an early-morning four-hour siege that poured thousands of rounds into the Los Angeles BPP office. By mid-morning, hundreds of angry Black residents gathered at the scene and demanded that the police cease-fire. Fortunately, Geronimo ji Jaga, decorated Vietnam vet, had earlier fortified the office to withstand an assault and no Panthers were seriously injured. However, repercussions from the outcome eventually drove him underground. The widespread attacks left Panthers dead all across the country—Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, John Savage, Walter Toure Pope, Bobby Hutton, Sylvester Bell, Frank “Capt. Franco” Diggs, Fred Bennett, James Carr, Larry Robeson, Spurgeon “Jake” Winters, Alex Rackley, Arthur Morris, Steve Bartholomew, Robert Lawrence, Tommy Lewis, Nathaniel Clark, Welton Armstead, Sidney Miller, Sterling Jones, Babatunde Omawali, Samuel Napier, Harold Russell, and Robert Webb, among others. In the three years after J. Edgar Hoover’s infamous COINTELPRO memorandum, [two dozen —Ed] members of the BPP were killed. Nearly a thousand were arrested and key leaders were sent to jail. Others were driven underground. Still others, like BPP field marshal Donald “DC” Cox, were driven into exile overseas. The RNA was similarly attacked that year. During its second annual convention in March ’69, held at Reverend C.L. Franklin’s New Bethel Church in Detroit, a police provocation sparked a siege that poured 800 rounds into the church. Several convention participants were wounded; one policeman was

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

killed, another wounded, and the entire convention (140 people) arrested en masse. When Reverend Franklin (father of “The Queen of Soul” singer Aretha Franklin) and Black state representative James Del Rio were informed of the incident they called Black judge George Crockett, who proceeded to the police station where he found total legal chaos. Almost 150 people were being held incommunicado. They were being questioned, fingerprinted, and given nitrate tests to determine if they had fired guns—in total disregard of fundamental constitutional procedures. Hours after the roundup, there wasn’t so much as a list of persons being held and no one had been formally arrested. An indignant Judge Crockett set up court right in the station house and demanded that the police either press charges or release their captives. He had handled about fifty cases when the Wayne County prosecutor, called in by the police, intervened. The prosecutor promised that the use of all irregular methods would be halted. Crockett adjourned the impromptu court and by noon the following day the police had released all but a few individuals who were held on specific charges. Chaka Fuller, Rafael Vierra, and Alfred Hibbit (Alfred 2X)were charged with the killing of the police officer. All three were subsequently tried and acquitted. Chaka Fuller was mysteriously assassinated a few months afterwards. On Friday, the 13th of June 1969, Clarence 13X , founder of the Five Percenters, was mysteriously assassinated in the elevator of a Harlem project building by three male Negroes. His killers were never discovered but his adherents suspect government complicity in his death. News reports at the time hinted that BSS instigated the assassination to try to foment a war between the NOI and the Five Percenters. Revolutionaries nationwide were attacked and/or arrested—Tyari Uhuru, Maka, Askufo, and the Smyrna Brothers in Delaware; JoJo Muhammad Bowens and Fred Burton in Philadelphia; and Panthers Mondo we Langa, Ed Poindexter, and Veronza Daoud Bowers Jr. in Omaha. Police mounted an assault on the Panther office in the Desiree Projects of New Orleans, which resulted in several arrests. A similar attack was made on the People’s Party office in Houston. One of their leaders, Carl Hampton, was killed by the police, and another, Lee Otis Johnson, was arrested later on an unrelated charge and sentenced to forty-one years in prison for alleged possession of one marijuana cigarette. The Rise of Prison Struggles Like the Panthers, most of those arrested brought their philosophies with them into the prisons. Likewise, most had outside support committees to one degree or another so that this influx of political prisoners linked the struggle

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behind the walls with the struggles in local communities on the outside. The combination set off a beehive of political activity behind the walls, and prisoners stepped up their struggle for political, Afrikan, Islamic, and academic studies, access to political literature, community access to prisons, an end to arbitrary punishments, access to attorneys, adequate law libraries, relevant vocational training, contact visits, better food, health care, housing, and a myriad of other struggles. The forms of prison struggle ranged from face-toface negotiations to mass petitioning, letter writing, and call-in campaigns, outside demonstrations, class-action lawsuits, hunger strikes, work strikes, rebellions, and more drastic actions. Overall, all forms of struggle served to roll back draconian prison policies that had stood for centuries, and to further the development of the New Afrikan liberation struggle behind the walls. These struggles would not have been as successful, or would have been much more costly in terms of lives lost or brutality endured, had it not been for the links to the community and the community support—and legal support—that political prisoners brought with them into the prisons. Although that support was not always sufficient in quantity or quality, and was sometimes nonexistent or came with hidden agendas, or was marked by frequent conflicts, on the whole it was this combination of resolute prisoners, community support, and legal support which was most often successful in prison struggles. The Changing Complexion of Prisons As the ’60s drew to a close New Afrikan and Third World nationalities made up nearly 50 percent of the prison population. National liberation consciousness became the dominant influence behind the walls as the overall complexion neared the changeover from white to Black, brown, and red. The decade-long general decrease in prisoners, particularly whites, brought a drop of between 16,000 and 23,000, while the total number of New Afrikan prisoners increased slightly or changed insignificantly over the same period. Yet the next decade would begin the period of unprecedented new prison construction, as the primary role of U.S. prisons changed from “suppression of the working classes” to suppression of domestic Black and Third World liberation struggles inside the U.S. Origin of CRIP There existed street organizations in South Central Los Angeles before the rise of the Black Panther Party. These groups, criminal in essence, were indeed the wells from which the Panthers would recruit their most stalwart members. Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, who chartered the first L.A. chapter of the Party,

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

was the leader of perhaps the most violent street organization of that time—The Slausons. James Carr, former cellmate of comrade George Jackson and author of BAD, was a member of the Farmers. There were the Gladiators, the Businessmen, the Avenues, Blood Alley, and the Rebel Rousers, to name but a few. After the 1965 rebellion in Watts, there came an unsteady truce of sorts that caused the street organizations to focus on a larger, more deadly enemy— the Los Angeles Police Department. So, by the time the Black Panther Party came to L.A. in 1968 a shaky peace existed among them in which they could vent their anger, respond to injustice, and represent their neighborhoods. By and large, the Party usurped the youthful rage and brought the street organizations of that time to an end. Of course, the U.S. government also did its share by drafting young brothers into the Vietnam War. These, however, were the storm years of COINTELPRO, and the Party was the focal point. Thus, by late ’69, the aboveground infrastructure of the BPP was in shambles due to its own internal contradictions and the weight of the state. Confusion set in among the people, creating, if you will, a window of opportunity—of which both the criminals and the counterrevolutionists in the government took advantage. Community Relations for an Independent People (CRIP) was a cityfunded team post (meeting place) on the east side of L.A. that played host to some of the area’s most rowdy youth. One such brother was Raymond Washington, who at the time belonged to a young upstart clique called the Baby Avenues. The team post became center ground to an ever-widening group of youth who eventually took its title, CRIP, as a name and moved westward with it. With the vanguard in shambles and the local pigs turning a deliberate deaf ear, the CRIPs flourished rapidly. In its formative years, the Party’s influence was evident within it, for the same uniform/dress code of the Party’s was that of the CRIPs. Yet a sinister twist developed in which New Afrikan people became targets of the young hoodlums. And with no vanguard forces readily available to teach and train these youth, they spiraled out of control, taking as their nemesis the Brims, who later developed into the citywide Bloods. The founding of the CRIPs is established as 1969. Their gang color is blue, and sometimes also the color white.

Enter the ’70s A California guard, rated as an expert marksman, opened the decade of the ’70s with the January 13th shooting at close range of W.L. Nolen, Cleveland Edwards, and Alvin “Jug” Miller in the Soledad prison yard. They were left

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lying where they fell until it was too late for them to be saved by medical treatment. Nolen, in particular, had been instrumental in organizing recent demonstrations at Soledad Prison in protest of killings by guards of two other Black prisoners—Clarence Causey and William Powell. He was consequently both a thorn in the side of prison officials and a hero to the Black prison populations. When the guard was exonerated two weeks later of the triple killings of Nolen and two others, the prisoners retaliated by throwing a guard off the tier. George Jackson, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette were charged with the guard’s death and came to be known as the Soledad Brothers. California’s Black prisoners solidified around the Soledad Brothers case and the chain of events led to the formation of the Black Guerrilla Family (BGF). The Panthers spearheaded a massive campaign to save the Soledad Brothers from the gas chamber. The nationwide coalescence of prisoners and support groups around the case converted the scattered, disparate prison struggles into a national prison movement. On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, younger brother of George, attempted to liberate Ruchell Cinque Magee, William Christmas, and James McClain from the Marin County courthouse in California. Jonathan, McClain, Christmas, and the trial judge were killed by SWAT teams, who also wounded the prosecutor and paralyzed him for life. Miraculously, Ruchell and three wounded jurors survived the fusillade. Jonathan frequently served as Angela Davis’s bodyguard. She had purchased weapons for that purpose, but Jonathan used those same weapons in the breakout attempt. Immediately afterward she became the object of an international “woman hunt.” On October 13, Angela was captured in New York City and was subsequently returned to California to undergo a very acrimonious trial with Magee. She was acquitted on all charges. Magee was tried separately and convicted on lesser charges. He remains imprisoned to date—over three decades in all [four decades at the time of publication of this edition —Ed.]—and is our longest-held political prisoner. Origin of the Bloods Most South Central street organizations, commonly called “gangs,” “sets,” or “orgs,” take their names from prominent streets: Slauson, Denver Lane, Piru, Hoover, etc., that run through their neighborhood. The CRIPs had already formed, were massed up and rolling together. Their strength attracted other sets to become CRIPs. As they moved into territories occupied by other South Central organizations they met stiff resistance from those neighborhood sets who did not want to align with or be taken over by them.

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

Among those gang leaders resisting the CRIP invasion were Peabody of the Denver Lanes, Puddin of the Westside Pirus, Rooster of the 30 Pirus, and the Westside Brims—perhaps the most well-known and respected of the lot, although their leader is unknown today. The Brims families used their prestige and influence to recruit other sets to join their side in opposition to the CRIPs. As the various sets began hooking up with each other to start other Brim families and to recruit other sets to join their side in opposition to the CRIPs in the early 1970s, the federation solidified and formally united into the citywide Bloods. They adopted the color red as their banner; they also use the colors green or brown. Prison is a normal next stop for many gang members. The first Bloods sent to Chino, a mainline California prison, are commonly referred to in Blood circles as the “First Bloods to walk the line at Chino.” To increase their prison membership and recruitment, they created a “Bloodline (BL) Constitution” patterned after the constitution of the BGF: a Panther-influenced group already established in the California prison system at the time. The BL Constitution contained the Blood’s code of conduct, history, and bylaws and was required reading for each new recruit. To speed up recruitment, the older “First Bloods” made reading the constitution an automatic induction into their ranks and thereafter began tricking young prisoners into reading it. Once read, the new recruit could only reject membership at the risk of serious bodily harm. The press-ganging of young recruits at Chino set off ripples of dissatisfaction and breakaways among Bloods in other California prisons. Those disaffected centered around Peabody at Old Folsom Prison who took parts from the BL and the BGF constitutions and created a new United Blood Nation (UBN) Constitution designed to unify all Bloods in prison. Since then, Bloods have chosen which constitution they would come under. If they choose either the BL or UBN Constitution they are held to a higher standard than other members; they hold positions and are similar to the officers’ corps of a military organization. Those Bloods not under a constitution are the foot soldiers. The BL and UBN organization spread throughout the California prison system, and they are strictly prison organizations. Once a Blood leaves prison he returns to his old neighborhood set. From South Central the Bloods spread to Pasadena, Gardenia, San Diego, Sacramento, Bakersfield, and throughout the state and its prison system. San Francisco Bay Area Gangs San Francisco Bay Area gangs or “cliques” can be traced back to the early 1960s and are usually identified by, or named after, their neighborhoods or

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communities. Most of those functioning today came from splinter groups of the BPP after it broke up. In Oakland, the 69th Street Mob, founded by Felix Mitchell in the early 1970s, still exists despite the government’s best efforts to derail it. In East Oakland the Rolling 20s and the 700 Club, along with the Acorn Gang in West Oakland, are the powerhouse cliques on the streets. In San Francisco, there is Sunnydale and Hunters Point, the city’s largest street gang which is divided into several cliques—Oakdale, Harbor Road, West Point, etc. East Palo Alto is the home of the Professional Low Riders (PLR), who are a major influence in the South Bay Area—and in Vallejo there are the North Bay Gangsters and Crestview. Most Bay Area gangs don’t have colors but align primarily on the basis of money and hustling endeavors. Many are associated with the rap music industry and with various prison groups— the 415 Kumi, BGF, or Ansar El Muhammed Muslims. Growth of the Gangster Disciples In 1970, Gangster Disciple (GD) Larry Hoover was convicted for a gangrelated murder and sentenced to a 150 to 200–year state sentence. He’s the current leader of the GDs and runs the syndicate from an Illinois prison cell. As drugs flooded into the Chicago ghettos, young black men flooded into the Illinois prisons where they were given GD application forms to fill out. If their references proved solid, they were indoctrinated into the gang. Everyone who joined had to memorize the GD’s sixteen-rule code. The GDs spread throughout the Illinois and Midwest prison systems. The flow of GDs back into the streets enabled them to expand their street network which is an intricate command and control structure, similar to a military organization. Comrade George Assassinated On August 21, 1971, a guard shot and killed George Jackson as he bolted from a control unit and ran for the San Quentin wall. Inside the unit lay three guards and two trustees dead. The circumstances surrounding George Jackson’s legendary life and death, and the astuteness of his published writings, left a legacy that inspires and instructs the New Afrikan liberation struggle on both sides of the wall even today, and will for years to come. September 13, 1971, became the bloodiest day in U.S. prison history when New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the retaking of Attica prison. The previous several years had seen a number of prison rebellions flare up across the country as prisoners protested widespread maltreatment and inhumane conditions. Most had been settled peaceably with little or no loss of human life after face-to-face

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

negotiation between prisoners and state and prison officials. At Attica Black, brown, white, red, and yellow prisoners took over one block of the prison and stood together for five days seeking to negotiate an end to their inhumane conditions. Their now-famous dictum declared: “We are men, not beasts, and will not be driven as such.” But Rockefeller had presidential ambitions. The rebelling prisoners’ demands included a political request for asylum in a non-imperialistic country. Rockefeller’s refusal to negotiate foreshadowed a macabre replay of his father John D.’s slaughter of striking Colorado miners and their families decades earlier. Altogether forty-three people died at Attica. New York State troopers’ bullets killed thirty-nine people—twenty-nine prisoners and ten guards—in retaking Attica and shocked the world by the naked barbarity of the U.S. prison system. Yet the Attica rebellion too remains a milestone in the development of the New Afrikan liberation struggle behind the walls, a symbol of the highest development of prisoner multinational solidarity to date. New World Clashes with the Nation of Islam In 1973, the simmering struggle for control of Newark’s NOI Temple No. 25 erupted into the open. Warren Marcello, a New World member, assassinated NOI Temple No. 25 Minister Shabazz. In retaliation several NWI members were attacked and killed within the confines of the New Jersey prison system, and before the year was out the bodies of Marcello and a companion were found beheaded In Newark’s Weequahic Park. Ali Hassan, still in prison, was tried as one of the coconspirators in the death of Shabazz and was found innocent. The Black Liberation Army COINTELPRO’s destruction of the BPP forced many members underground and gave rise to the Black Liberation Army (BLA)—a New Afrikan guerrilla organization. The BLA continued the struggle by waging urban guerrilla war across the U.S. through highly mobile strike teams. The government’s intensified search for the BLA during the early 1970s resulted in the capture of Geronimo ji Jaga in Dallas, Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Jamal Joseph in New York, Sha Sha Brown and Blood McCreary in St. Louis, Nuh Washington and Jalil Muntaqim in Los Angeles, Herman Bell in New Orleans, Francisco and Gabriel Torres in New York, Russell Maroon Shoatz in Philadelphia, Chango Monges, Mark Holder, and Kamau Hilton in New York, Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli in New Jersey, Ashanti Alston, Tarik, and Walid in New Haven, Safiya Bukhari and Masai Gibson in Virginia, and others. Left dead during the government’s search

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

and destroy missions were Sandra Pratt (wife of Geronimo ji Jaga, assassinated while visibly pregnant), Mark Essex, Woody Changa Green, Twyman Kakuyan Olugbala Meyers, Frank “Heavy” Fields, Anthony Kimu White, Zayd Shakur, Melvin Rema Kerney, Alfred Kambui Butler, Ron Carter, Rory Hithe, and John Thomas, among others. Red Adams, left paralyzed from the neck down by police bullets, would die from the effects a few years later. Other New Afrikan freedom fighters, not directly a part of BLA, were also attacked, hounded, and captured during the same general era. These included Imari Obadele and the RNA-11 in Jackson, Mississippi; Don Taylor and De Mau Mau of Chicago; Hanif Shabazz, Abdul Aziz, and the VI-5 in the Virgin Islands; Mark Cook of the George Jackson Brigade (GJB) in Seattle; Ahmed Obafemi of the RNA in Florida; Atiba Shanna in Chicago; Mafundi Lake in Alabama; Sekou Kambui and Imani Harris in Alabama; Robert Aswad Duren in California; Kojo Bomani Sababu and Dharuba Cinque in Trenton; John Partee and Tommie Lee Hodges of Alkebulan in Memphis; Gary Tyler in Los Angeles; Kareem Saif Allah and the Five Percenter–BLA–Islamic Brothers in New York; Ben Chavis and the Wilmington 10 in North Carolina; Delbert Africa and MOVE members in Philadelphia; and others doubtless too numerous to name. Political Converts in Prison Not everyone was political before incarceration. John Andaliwa Clark became so, and a freedom fighter par excellence, only after being sent behind the walls. He paid the supreme sacrifice during a hail of gunfire from Trenton State Prison guards. Hugo Dahariki Pinell also became political after being sent behind the California walls in 1964. He has been in prison ever since. [Pinell was murdered in California State Prison–Sacramento in 2015. —Ed.] Joan Little took an ice pick from a white North Carolina guard who had used it to force her to perform oral sex on him. She killed him, escaped to New York, was captured and forced to return to the same North Carolina camp where she feared for her life. Massive public vigilance and support enabled her to complete the sentence in relative safety and obtain her release. Dessie Woods and Cheryl Todd, hitchhiking through Georgia, were given a ride by a white man who tried to rape them. Woods took his gun, killed him, and was sent to prison where officials drugged and brutalized her. Todd was also imprisoned and subsequently released upon completion of the sentence. Woods was denied parole several times then finally released. Political or not, each arrest was met with highly sensationalized prejudicial publicity that continued unabated to and throughout the trial. The negative

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

publicity blitz was designed to guarantee a conviction, smokescreen the real issues involved, and justify immediate placement in the harshest prison conditions possible. For men this usually means the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois. For women it has meant the control unit in the federal penitentiary at Alderson, West Virginia, or Lexington, Kentucky. Effect of Captured Freedom Fighters on Prisons In 1988 political prisoners Silvia Baraldini, Alejandrina Torres, and Susan Rosenberg won a D.C. District Court lawsuit brought by attorneys Adjoa Aiyetoro, Jan Susler, and others. The legal victory temporarily halted the practice of sending prisoners to control units strictly because of their political status. The ruling was reversed by the D.C. Appellate Court a year later. Those political prisoners not sent to Marion, Alderson, or Lexington control units are sent to other control units modeled after Marion/Lexington but located within maximum security state prisons. Normally this means twenty-threehour-a-day lockdown in long-term units located in remote hinterlands far from family, friends, and attorneys, with heavy censorship and restrictions on communications, visits, and outside contacts, combined with constant harassment, provocation, and brutality by prison guards. The influx of so many captured freedom fighters (i.e., prisoners of war— POWs) with varying degrees of guerrilla experience added a valuable dimension to the New Afrikan liberation struggle behind the walls. In the first place it accelerated the prison struggles already in process, particularly the attack on control units. One attack was spearheaded by Michael Deutsch and Jeffrey Haas of the People’s Law Office, Chicago, which challenged Marion’s H-Unit boxcar cells. Another was spearheaded by Assata Shakur and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which challenged her out-of-state placement in the Alderson, West Virginia control unit. Second, it stimulated a thoroughgoing investigation and exposure of COINTELPRO’s hand in waging low intensity warfare on New Afrikan and Third World nationalities in the U.S. This was spearheaded by Geronimo ji Jaga with Stuart Hanlon’s law office in the West and by Dhoruba Bin Wahad with attorneys Liz Fink, Robert Boyle, and Jonathan Lubell in the East. These COINTELPRO investigations resulted in the overturn of Bin Wahad’s conviction and his release from prison in March 1990 after he had been imprisoned nineteen years for a crime he did not commit. Third, it broadened the scope of the prison movement to the international arena by producing the initial presentation of the U.S. political prisoner and prisoner of war (PP/POW) issue before the UN’s Human Rights Commis-

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sion. This approach originated with Jalil Muntaqim, and was spearheaded by him and attorney Kathryn Burke on the West Coast and by Sundiata Acoli and attorney Lennox Hinds of the National Conference of Black Lawyers on the East Coast. This petition sought relief from human rights violations in U.S. prisons and subsequently asserted a colonized people’s right to fight against alien domination and racist regimes as codified in the Geneva Convention. Fourth, it intensified, clarified, and broke new ground on political issues and debates of particular concern to the New Afrikan community, i.e., the “national question,” spearheaded by Atiba Shanna in the Midwest. All these struggles, plus those already in process, were carried out with the combination in one form or another of resolute prisoners and community-legal support. Community support when present came from various sources—family, comrades, friends; political, student, religious, and prisoner rights groups; workers, professionals, and progressive newspapers and radio stations. Some of those involved over the years were or are: the National Committee for Defense of Political Prisoners, the Black Community News Service, the African Peoples Party, the Republic of New Afrika, the African Peoples Socialist Party, The East, the Bliss Chord Communication Network, Liberation Book Store, WDAS Radio Philadelphia, WBLS Radio New York, Radio New York, Third World Newsreel, Libertad (political journal of the Puerto Rican Movimiento de Liberación Nacional [MLN]), the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the May 19th Communist Organization, the Madame Binh Graphics Collective, The Midnight Express, the Northwest Iowa Socialist Party, the National Black United Front, the Nation of Islam, Arm the Spirit, Black News, International Class Labor Defense, the Real Dragon Project, the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, the National Prison Project, the House of the Lord Church, the American Friends Service Committee, attorneys Chuck Jones and Harold Ferguson of Rutgers Legal Clinic, the Jackson Advocate newspaper, Rutgers law students, the Committee to End the Marion Lockdown, the American Indian Movement, and others.

The End of the ’70s As the decade wound down, the late ’70s saw the demise of the NOI following the death of Elijah Muhammad and the rise of orthodox Islam among significant segments of New Afrikans on both sides of the wall. By 1979, the prison population stood at 300,000, a whopping 100,000 increase within a single decade. The previous 100,000 increase—from 100,000 to 200,000—had taken thirty-one years, from 1927 to 1958. The initial increase to 100,000 had

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

taken hundreds of years. Since America’s original colonial times. The ’60s were the transition decade of white flight that saw a significant decrease in both prison population and white prisoners. And since the total Black prison population increased only slightly or changed insignificantly over the decade of the insurgent ’60s through 1973, it indicates that New Afrikans are imprisoned least when they fight hardest. The decade ended on a masterstroke by the BLA’s Multinational Task Force, with the November 2, 1979, prison liberation of Assata Shakur—“Soul of the BLA” and preeminent political prisoner of the era. The Task Force then whisked her away to the safety of political asylum in Cuba where she remains to date.

The Decade of the ’80s In June 1980, Ali Hassan was released after sixteen years in the New Jersey state prisons. Two months later, five New World Nation of Islam (NWI) members were arrested after a North Brunswick, New Jersey, bank robbery in a car with stolen plates. The car belonged to the recently released Ali Hassan, who had loaned it to a friend. Ali Hassan and fifteen other NWI members refused to participate in the resulting mass trial, which charged them in a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) indictment with conspiracy to rob banks for the purpose of financing various NWI enterprises in the furtherance of creating an independent Black Nation. All defendants were convicted and sent behind the walls. The ’80s brought another round of BLA freedom fighters behind walls— Bashir Hameed and Abdul Majid in 1980; Sekou Odinga, Kuwasi Balagoon, Chui Ferguson-El, Jamal Joseph again, Mutulu Shakur, and numerous BLA Multinational Task Force supporters in 1981; and Terry Khalid Long, Leroy Ojore Bunting, and others in 1982. The government’s sweep left Mtyari Sundiata dead, Kuwasi Balagoon subsequently dead in prison from AIDS, and Sekou Odinga brutally tortured upon capture—torture that included pulling out his toenails and rupturing his pancreas during long sadistic beatings that left him hospitalized for six months. But this second round of captured BLA freedom fighters brought forth, perhaps for the first time, a battery of young, politically astute New Afrikan lawyers: Chokwe Lumumba, Jill Soffiyah Elijah, Nkechi Taifa, Adjoa Aiyetoro, Ashanti Chimurenga, Michael Tarif Warren, and others. They are not only skilled in representing New Afrikan POWs but the New Afrikan Independence Movement too, all of which added to the further development of the New Afrikan liberation struggle behind the walls.

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The decade also brought behind the walls Mumia Abu-Jamal, the widely respected Philadelphia radio announcer, popularly known as the “Voice of the Voiceless.” He maintained a steady drumbeat of radio support for MOVE prisoners. While moonlighting as a taxi driver on the night of December 9, 1981, he discovered a policeman beating his younger brother. Mumia was shot and seriously wounded, the policeman was killed. Mumia now sits on death row in greatest need of mass support from every sector, if he’s to be saved from the state’s electric chair. [After a widespread international campaign and legal battle, Abu-Jamal was removed from death row and eventually resentenced to life in prison without parole. —Ed.] Kazi Toure of the United Freedom Front (UFF) was sent behind the walls in 1982. He was released in 1991. The New York 8—Coltrane Chimurenga, Viola Plummer and her son Robert “R.T.” Taylor, Roger Wareham, Omowale Clay, Lateefah Carter, Colette Pean, and Yvette Kelly were arrested on October 17, 1984, and charged with conspiring to commit prison breakouts and armed robberies, and to possess weapons and explosives. However, the New York 8 was actually the New York 8+ because another eight or nine persons were jailed as grand jury resisters in connection with the case. The New York 8 were acquitted on August 5, 1985. That same year Ramona Africa joined other MOVE comrades already behind the walls. Her only crime was that she survived Philadelphia Mayor Goode’s May 13, 1985, bombing which cremated eleven MOVE members, their families (including their babies), home, and neighborhood. The following year, November 19, 1986, a twenty-year-old Bronx, New York youth, Larry Davis (now Adam Abdul Hakeem) would make a dramatic escape during a shootout with police who had come to assassinate him for absconding with drug-sales money that some cops had appropriated for themselves. Several policemen were wounded in the shootout. Adam escaped unscathed but surrendered weeks later in the presence of the media, his family, and a mass of neighborhood supporters. After numerous charges, trials, and acquittals in which he exposed the existence of a New York police–controlled drug ring that coerced Black and Puerto Rican youths to push police-supplied drugs, he was sent behind the walls on weapon possession convictions. Since incarceration, numerous beatings by guards have paralyzed him from the waist down and confined him to a wheelchair. On July 16, 1987, Abdul Haqq Muhammad, Arthur Majeed Barnes, and Robert “R.T.” Taylor, all members of the Black Men’s Movement Against Crack, were pulled over by state troopers in upstate New York, arrested, and subsequently sent to prison on a variety of weapon possession convictions.

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

Herman Ferguson at sixty-eight years old voluntarily returned to the U.S. on April 6, 1989, after twenty years exile in Ghana, Afrika, and Guyana, South America. He had fled the U.S. during the late ’60s after the appeal was denied on his sentence of three and a half to seven years following a conviction for conspiring to murder civil rights leaders. Upon return he was arrested at the airport and was moved constantly from prison to prison for several years as a form of harassment. The ’80s brought the Reagan era’s rollback of progressive trends on a wide front and a steep rise in racist incidents, white vigilantism, and police murder of New Afrikan and Third World people. It also brought the rebirth and re-establishment of the NOI, a number of New Afrikan POWs adopting orthodox Islam in lieu of revolutionary nationalism, the New Afrikan People’s Organization’s (NAPO) and its chairman Chokwe Lumumba’s emergence. From the RNA as banner carrier for the New Afrikan Independence Movement (NAIM), the New Orleans assassination of Lumumba Shakur of the Panther 21, and an upsurge in mass political demonstrations known as the “Days of Outrage” in New York City spearheaded by the December 12th Movement and others. The end of the decade brought the death of Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, allegedly killed by a young Black Guerrilla Family adherent on August 22, 1989, during a dispute over “crack.” Huey taught the Black masses socialism and popularized it through the slogan “Power to the People!” He armed the Black struggle and popularized it through the slogan “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” For that, and despite his human shortcomings, he was a true giant of the Black struggle, because his particular contribution is comparable to that of other modern-day giants, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. AIDS, crack, street crime, gang violence, homelessness, and arrest rates have all exploded throughout the Black colonies. The nation’s prison population on June 30, 1989, topped 673,000, an incredible 372,000 increase in less than a decade, causing the tripling and doubling of prison populations in thirty-four states and sizable increases in most others. New York City prisons became so overcrowded they began using ships as jails. William Bennett, former U.S. secretary of education and so-called drug czar, announced plans to convert closed military bases into concentration camps. The prison-building spree and escalated imprisonment rates continue unabated. The new prisoners are younger, more volatile, have long prison sentences, and are overwhelmingly of New Afrikan and Third World nationalities. It is estimated that by the year 1994 the U.S. will have over one million

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prisoners. Projections suggest that over 75 percent of them will be Black and other people of color. More are women than previously. Their percentage rose to 5 percent in 1980 from a low of 3 percent in 1970. Whites are arrested at about the same rate as in Western Europe while the New Afrikan arrest rate has surpassed that of Blacks in South Africa. In fact, the U.S. Black imprisonment rate is now the highest in the world. Ten times as many Blacks as whites are incarcerated per 100,000 population.

The ’90s and Beyond As we began to move through the ’90s, the New Afrikan liberation struggle behind the walls found itself coalescing around campaigns to free political prisoners and prisoners of war, helping to build a national PP/POW organization, strengthening its links on the domestic front, and building solidarity in the international arena. 1991 brought the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It freed many of the CIA’s Eastern Europe personnel for redeployment back to America to focus on the domestic war against people of color. In the same manner that COINTELPRO perfected techniques developed in the infamous Palmer raids at the end of World War I and used them against Communist Party USA, SCLC, NCC, BPP, NOI, RNA, and other domestic movements, repatriated CIA operatives used destabilization techniques developed in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Southeast Asia, etc., to wreak havoc in New Afrikan and other domestic communities of color today. Although the established media concentrated on the sensationalism of ghetto crack epidemics, street crime, drive-by shootings, and gang violence, there was a parallel long, quiet period of consciousness-raising in the New Afrikan colonies by the committed independence forces. The heightened consciousness of the colonies began to manifest itself through apparent random sparks of rebellion and the rise of innovative cultural trends, i.e., rap/ hip-hop “message” music, culturally designed hairstyles, dissemination of political/cultural video cassettes, re-sprouting of insurgent periodicals, and the resurrection of forgotten heroes; all of which presaged an oppressed people getting ready to push forward again. Meanwhile, the U.S. began building the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) control unit prison at Florence, Colorado, which would both supersede and augment USP Marion, Illinois. ADX at Florence combined, in a single hi-tech control prison complex, all the repressive features and techniques that had been perfected at USP Marion. In 1992, Fred Hampton Jr., son of the martyred Panther hero Fred Sr., was sent behind the walls. He was convicted of firebombing of a Korean “deli” in

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

Chicago in the aftermath of the Simi Valley, California, verdict that acquitted four policemen of the Rodney King beating, setting off the Los Angeles riots. In 1994, Shiriki Uganisha responded to the call of POWs Jalil Muntaqim, Sekou Odinga, Geronimo ji Jaga, and Mutulu Shakur, by hosting a national conference in Kansas City, Missouri, where various NAIM organizations discussed forming themselves into a national front. After a year of holding periodic negotiations in various cities, the discussion bore fruit in Atlanta, Georgia. On August 18, 1995, NAPO, the December 12th Movement, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee, the Black Cat Collective, International Campaign to Free Geronimo, the Sundiata Acoli Freedom Campaign, and various other POW and grassroots organizations formally unified under the banner of the New Afrikan Liberation Front, headed by Herman Ferguson. The mid-90s brought the World Trade Center bombing which marked the beginning of the U.S. strategy to substitute Islam for the former Soviet Union as the world’s new bogeyman. It produced the first foreign Islamic PP/ POWs—Amir Abdelgani, Rasheed Clement El, Sheik Omar Eahman, and others. The mid-decade also brought forth a growing right-wing white militia movement that had obviously studied the guerrilla tactics and political language of the ’60s left-wing movements but not its philosophy of avoiding innocent deaths—and which culminated in the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building causing 168 deaths. Upon arrest, Timothy McVeigh, a right-winger and by then the chief suspect, usurped the language of the left by claiming POW status. He was subsequently convicted. But largely overlooked in the media coverage of his case was McVeigh’s firsthand verification of the U.S. government’s involvement in bringing drugs into this country (and the ghettos) and its use of the police in carrying out assassinations, notable because the overwhelming majority of people killed or assassinated by police in this country are people of color. Timothy McVeigh had been an All-American boy—a longhaired, blueeyed patriot who enlisted in the army to defend the American way of life that he so fervently believed in. He rose rapidly through the military ranks (private to sergeant) in two years, and was accepted into the Special Forces: the elite, top 4 percent of the military’s forces. There he learned something that average thinking persons of color have known most of their lives but found difficult to prove. McVeigh’s own words provide the proof. In an October 1991 letter to his sister and confidant, Jennifer, McVeigh disclosed his revulsion at being told that he and nine other Special Forces

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commanders might be ordered to help the CIA, “fly drugs into the U.S. to fund covert operations” and “work hand in hand with civilian police agencies” as “government paid assassins.” Disillusioned and embittered with the U.S. government, McVeigh soon left military service, gravitated deeper into the right-wing militia service, and surfaced four years later upon his arrest in the Oklahoma City bombing case. The mid-90s found white anarchists Neil Batelli and Mathias Bolton collaborating with Black POWs Ojore Lutalo, Sekou Odinga, and Sundiata Acoli, which resulted in the transformation of their local New Jersey Anarchist Black Cross into an ABC Federation (ABCF) which now serves as a role model of the proper way for organizations to provide political and financial support to PP/POWs of all nationalities. The period also witnessed the re-sprouting of Black revolutionary organizations patterned after the BPP (the Black Panther Collective, the Black Panther Militia)—along with the NOI Minster Louis Farrakhan’s emergence at the October 16, 1995, Million Man March (MMM) in Washington, D.C., as an undeniable force on the New Afrikan, Islamic, and world stage. In the meantime, the U.S. moved further to the right with the passage of a series of racist, anti-worker legislation. The government ratified the NAFTA treaty to legitimize the policy of private corporations sending U.S. jobs overseas. California passed Proposition 209, which killed affirmative action programs throughout the state. Then, it floated Proposition 187, whose purpose was to implement statewide racist anti-immigration legislation. But this failed to pass. The federal government killed Black voting districts and passed Clinton’s Omnibus Crime Bill, which greatly increased the number of crime statutes, death penalty statutes, policemen and armaments, arrests of people of color, youths tried as adults, three-strike convictions, and prison expansion projects. The so-called War on Drugs sent Blacks and other people of color, more commonly associated with crack cocaine, to prison in droves while allowing white offenders to go free. Five grams of crack worth a few hundred dollars is punishable by a mandatory five-year prison sentence, but it takes 500 grams, or $50,000 worth of powdered cocaine, more commonly associated with wealthier whites, before facing the same five years. In the mid-90s, 1,600 people were sent to prison each week. Three out of every four were Black or Latino, with the rate of Afrikan women imprisonment growing faster than that of Afrikan men. Blacks were 90 percent of the federal crack convictions in 1994. The normal assumption follows that Blacks are the majority of crack users. Wrong! Whites are the majority of crack users but were less than 4 percent of the crack

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

convictions, and no white person had been convicted of a federal crack offense in the Los Angeles area since 1986—or ever in Chicago, Miami, Denver, or sixteen states according to the 1992 survey. As a result, there are now more Afrikan men in prison than in college, and one out of every three Afrikan men aged twenty to twenty-nine is in prison, jail, or on probation or parole. Most of the convictions were obtained by an informant’s tainted testimony only, no hard evidence, in exchange for the informant’s freedom from prosecution or prison. After lobbying Congress for a few years, Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), a predominately white lobby group, succeeded in getting harsh mandatory sentences lowered for marijuana and LSD convictions. Both drugs are more commonly associated with white offenders, and FAMM’s success resulted in the release of numerous white offenders from long prison sentences. Blacks and other prisoners of color patiently waited for similar corrections to be made to the gross disparity between crack and powdered cocaine sentences. Several years passed before the answer came during a 1995 C-SPAN TV live broadcast of the congressional session debating the disparity in sentencing. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) member Maxine Waters’s summation speech, typical of those made by congresspersons in favor of correcting the disparity, included the following: Mr. Chairman, we have been before this body this evening pointing out the disparity, pointing out the inequality, pointing out the injustice of the system as it operates now. I am surprised at much of the rhetoric and all of these so-called conversations that my friends on the other side of the aisle have been having in minority communities. I am glad to know that my colleagues are going there. I am glad to know that they are communicating. But let me tell my colleagues what the mothers in my community say where I live. They say: Ms. Waters, why do they not get the big drug dealers? What is this business under Bush that stopped resources going to interdiction? Why is it large amounts of drugs keep flowing into inner cities? Where do they come from and why don’t they get the real criminals, Ms. Waters, why is it 19-year-olds who wander out into the community and get a few rocks of crack cocaine? Why is it they end up in the Federal system? Why is it they end up with these 5-year minimum mandatory, up to 10-year mandatory sentences? Why can’t you get the big guys? They say: We believe there is a conspiracy. This is what mothers in these communities say. We believe there is a conspiracy against our children and against our communities. They do not understand it when policymakers get

Look for Me in the Whirlwind up and say, Oh, it is not interdiction that we should be concerned about. As long as there is a desire for drugs they are going to continue to flow, and what we have to do is just concentrate on telling them, Just say no. They say: Ms. Waters, we do not understand that and we do not know why a first time offender, who happens to be black or Latino, ends up with a 5-year sentence. And why is the Federal Government targeting our communities? They are not targeting white communities who are the major drug abusers. They are targeting our communities from the Federal level. Thus, our kids go into the Federal system and the whites who are drug abusers and traffickers go into the state systems. They get off with their fancy lawyers with probation, with 1 year, with no time, and our kids are locked up. Mr. Chairman, for those of my colleagues who say, Well we know it is unfair, but just keep letting it go on for a while and we will take a look at it— are they out of their minds? How can they stand on the floor of Congress pretending to support a Constitution and a democracy and say, “We know it is not fair, but just let it continue and we may take another look at it”? When I give them the facts they know them to be true, and I will say it again. In Los Angeles, the U.S. District Court prosecuted no whites, none, for crack offense, between 1988 and 1994. And my colleagues tell me that they think it may be applied unequally? This is despite the fact that twothirds of those who have tried crack are white and over one-half of crack regular users are white. This is a fairness issue and it is a race issue. Mr. Chairman, I do not care how they try and paint it. I do not care what they say. This is patently unfair. It is blatant and my colleagues ought to be ashamed of themselves. It is racist, because their little white sons are not getting up in the system. They are not targeted. Our children are. Mr. Chairman, they are going into the Federal system with mandatory sentences and it is a race issue. It is a racist policy.

Despite the best arguments and passionate pleas of CBC members Waters, Jackson-Lee, Conyers, Watts, Fattah, Flukes, Lewis, Mfume, Payne, Rush, Stokes, Scott, and similar speeches by non-CBC members Clayton, Baker, Frank, Schroeder and Traficant, Congress voted 316 to 96 to continue the same 100 to 1 disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences. Instantly, prison exploded in riots, 28 in all, although most were whited-out of the news media, while across the country prison officials instituted a nationwide federal prisons lock down. The disparity in crack/powder cocaine sentencing laws remains to date; the only change made was the removal of the C-SPAN TV channel from all federal prisons’ TVs.

An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle

Only two prison elements grew faster than the Afrikan prison population. One was the number of jobs for prison guards and the other was prison slave labor industries. A California guard with a high school diploma makes $44,000 after seven years, which is more than the state pays its PhD public university associate professors and is $10,000 more than its average public school teacher’s salary. The national ratio for prisons is one guard for every 4.38 prisoners. And although the prisoners are usually Black or others of color, the guard hired is most often white, since most prisons are built in depressed, rural white areas to provide jobs to poor, unemployed white populations. After decades of the U.S. loudly accusing China of using prison labor in their export products, the U.S. sells prison products to the public. It set off a stampede by Wall Street and private corporations—Smith Barney, INM, AT&T, TWA, Texas Instruments, Dell, Honda, Lexus, Spaulding, Eddie Bauer, Brill Manufacturing Co., and many others—to shamelessly invest in prisons, set up slave labor factories in prisons to exploit every facet of the prison slave-labor industry for super profits, while callously discarding civilian workers for prison slave laborers. From 1980 to 1994, prisoners increased 221 percent, prison industries jumped an astonishing 358 percent, and prison sales skyrocketed from $392 million to $1.31 billion. By the year 2000, it is predicted that 30 percent of prisoners (or 500,000) will be industry workers producing $8.9 billion in goods and services. Although crime has been decreasing for five straight years, as we approach the new millennium we find that prison expansion has continued at a record pace and that the prison population has mushroomed over the last decade to an astonishing 1.75 million souls—the majority of whom are Black, period— not counting the 675,000 on parole and the 3,400,000 on probation for a grand sum of six million people under the jurisdiction of the criminal “justice” system. The prisons/jails have been majority Black since 1993 when Blacks ascended to 55 percent. Other prisoners of color made up 18 percent and whites shrank to 27 percent of the prison population. There are now over two Blacks for every white prisoner, and the ratio increases daily. The incarceration of women continues to accelerate. There are over 90,000 women in prison today; 54 percent are women of color, and 90 percent of women in prison are single mothers. Upon imprisonment they lose contact with their children, sometimes forever. There are 167,000 children in the U.S. whose mothers are incarcerated. [Editor’s note: Though specific contemporary statistics are hard to ascertain on a federal level, an August 2008 Bureau of Justice Statistics special report determined that from 1991 to 2007—ten years after the

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latest version of this article was published—the number of children whose mother was incarcerated rose by a staggering 131 percent. At that time, the number of U.S. children with a parent behind bars had risen to a record 1.7 million (at least).] The term “crime” has become a code word for “Black and other people of color.” The cry for “law and order,” “lock ’em up and throw away the key,” and for “harsher prisons” is heard everywhere. Nothing is too cruel to be done to prisoners. Control units and control prisons abound across the landscape and prison brutality and torture is the order of the day. The “war on drugs” continues apace, by now transparent to all as a “war, actually a preemptive strike, on people of color” to knock out our youth—our warrior class—and to decrease our birth rate, destabilize our families, re-enslave us through mass imprisonment, and ultimately to eliminate us. The threat is serious and real. We ignore it at our own peril. Despite the government massively imprisoning our youth and covertly fomenting deadly internecine wars among Black street gangs, the abhorrence of the Afrikan community and persistent “Peace Summits” sponsored by Afrikan spiritual, community, and prison leaders have produced, somewhat positive, although checkered results. The New Afrikan liberation struggle behind the walls now follows the laws of its own development, paid for in its own blood, intrinsically linked to the struggle of its own people, and rooted deeply in the ebb and flow of its own history. To know that history is already to know its future development and direction.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY AND ITS PLACE IN THE BLACK LIBERATION MOVEMENT Sundiata Acoli

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in October 1966, in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. The name was shortened to the Black Panther Party (BPP), and it began spreading eastward through the Black urban ghetto colonies across the country. In the summer of ’68, David Brothers established a BPP branch in Brooklyn, New York, and a few months later Lumumba Shakur set up a branch in Harlem, New York. I joined the Harlem BPP in the fall of ’68 and served as its finance officer until arrested on April 2, 1969, in the Panther 21 conspiracy case, which was the opening shot in the government’s nationwide attack on the BPP. Moving westward, police departments made military raids on BPP offices or homes in Philadelphia, Chicago, Newark, Omaha, Denver, New Haven, San Diego, Los Angeles, and other cities, murdering some Panthers and arresting others. After most other Panther 21 members and I were held in jail and on trial for two years, we were acquitted of all charges and released. Most of us returned to the community and to the BPP, but by then COINTELPRO had taken its toll. The BPP was rife with dissension, both internal and external. The internal strife, division, intrigue, and paranoia had become so ingrained that eventually most members drifted or were driven away. Some continued the 79

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

struggle on other fronts and some basically cooled out altogether. The BPP limped on for several more years, then died what seemed a natural death. History will be the ultimate judge of the BPP’s place in the Black Liberation Movement (BLM). But in these troubled times Afrikan people in the U.S. need to investigate both the positive and negative aspects of the BPP’s history in order to learn from those hard lessons already paid for in blood. In particular, we need to learn the reasons for the BPP’s rapid rise to prominence, the reason for its ability to move so many Afrikans and other nationalities, and the reason for its demise during its brief sojourn across the American scene. It is not possible in this short paper, on short notice, to provide much of what is necessary, so this paper will confine itself to pointing out some of the broader aspects of the BPP’s positive and negative contributions to the BLM.

The Positive Aspects of the BPP’s Contributions 1. Self-defense: This is one of the fundamental areas in which the BPP contributed to the BLM. It’s also one of the fundamental things that set the BPP apart from most previous Black organizations and which attracted members (particularly the youth), mass support, and a mass following. The concept is not only sound, it’s also common sense. But it must be implemented correctly, otherwise it can prove more detrimental than beneficial. The self-defense policies of the BPP need to be analyzed in this light by present-day Afrikan organizations. All history has shown that this government will bring its police and military powers to bear on any group which truly seeks to free Afrikan people. Any Black “freedom” organization which ignores self-defense does so at its own peril. 2. Revolutionary nationalist ideology: The BPP was a nationalist organization. Its main goal was the national liberation of Afrikan people in the U.S., and it restricted its membership to Blacks only. It was also revolutionary. The BPP’s theories and practices were based on socialist principles. It was anti-capitalist and struggled for a socialist revolution of U.S. society. On the national level, the BPP widely disseminated socialist-based programs to the Afrikan masses. Internationally, it provided Afrikans in the U.S. with a broader understanding of our relationship to the Afrikan continent, the emerging independent Afrikan nations, Third World nations, socialist nations, and all the liberation movements associated with these nations. Overall the ideology provided Afrikans here with a more concrete way of looking at and analyzing the world. Heretofore much of Black analysis of the world and the society in which we live was based on making ourselves

A Brief History of the Black Panther Party and Its Place in the BLM

acceptable to white society, proving to whites that we were human, proving to whites that we were ready for equality, proving we were equal to whites, disproving racist ideas held by whites, struggling for integration or equal status with whites, theories of “loving the enemy,” “hating the enemy,” “they’re all devils,” spook-ism, and other fuzzy images of how the real world worked. 3. Mass organizing techniques: Another fundamental thing that attracted members and mass support to the BPP was its policy of “serving the people.” This was a policy of going to the masses, living among them, sharing their burdens and organizing the masses to implement their own solutions to the day-to-day problems that were of great concern to them. By organizing and implementing the desires of the masses, the BPP organized community programs ranging from free breakfast for children to free health clinics, to rent strikes resulting in tenant ownership of their buildings, to liberation school for grade-schoolers, to free clothing drives, to campaigns for community control of schools, community control of police, and campaigns to stop drugs, crime, and police murder and brutality in the various Black colonies across America. For these reasons, and others, the influence of the BPP spread far beyond its actual membership. Not only did the BPP programs teach self-reliance, but years later the government established similar programs such as free school lunch, expanded medicare and daycare facilities, and liberalized court procedures for tenant takeovers of poorly maintained housing—partly if not primarily in order to snuff out the memory of previous similar BPP programs and the principle of self-reliance. 4. Practice of women’s equality: Another positive contribution of the BPP was its advocating and practice of equality for women throughout all levels of the organization and in society itself. This occurred at a time when most Black nationalist organizations were demanding that the woman’s role be in the home and/or one step behind the Black man, and at a time when the whole country was going through a great debate on the women’s liberation issue. 5. Propaganda techniques: The BPP made significant contributions to the art of propaganda. It was very adept at spreading its message and ideas through its newspaper The Black Panther, mass rallies, speaking tours, slogans, posters, leaflets, cartoons, buttons, symbols (e.g., the clenched fist), graffiti, political trials, and even funerals. The BPP also spread its ideas through very skillful use of the establishment’s TV, radio, and print media. One singular indication, although there are others, of the effectiveness of

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BPP propaganda techniques is that even today, over a decade later, a large part of the programs shown on TV are still “police stories,” and many of the roles available to Black actors are limited to police roles. A lot of this has to do with the overall process of still trying to rehabilitate the image of the police from its devastating exposure during the Panther era, and to prevent the true role of the police in this society from being exposed again.

The Negative Aspects of the BPP’s Contributions 1. Leadership corrupted: COINTELPRO eventually intimidated and corrupted all three of the BPP’s top leaders: Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver. Each, in his own way, caved in to the pressures and began acting in a manner that was designed deliberately to destroy the BPP and to disillusion not only Party members but Afrikan people in America for years to come. COINTELPRO’s hopes were that Afrikans in America would be so disillusioned that never again would they trust or follow any Afrikan leader or organization which advocated real solutions to Black oppression. 2. Combined above and underground: This was the most serious structural flaw in the BPP. Party members who functioned openly in the BPP offices, or organized openly in the community by day, might very well have been the same people who carried out armed operations at night. This provided the police with a convenient excuse to make raids on any and all BPP offices or on members’ homes, under the pretext that they were looking for suspects, fugitives, weapons, or explosives. It also sucked the BPP into the unwinnable position of making stationary defenses of BPP offices. There should have been a clear separation between the aboveground Party and the underground armed apparatus. Also, small military forces should never adopt, as a general tactic, the position of making stationary defenses of offices, homes, buildings, etc. 3. Rhetoric outstripped capabilities: Although the BPP was adept at the art of propaganda and made very good use of its own and the establishment’s media, still too many Panthers fell into the habit of making boisterous claims in the public media, or selling “wolf tickets” that they couldn’t back up. Eventually, they weren’t taken seriously anymore. The press, some of whom were police agents, often had only to stick a microphone under a Panther’s nose to make him or her begin spouting rhetoric. This often played into the hands of those who were simply looking for slanderous

A Brief History of the Black Panther Party and Its Place in the BLM

material to air or to provide possible intelligence information to the police. Lumpen tendencies: It can be safely said that the largest segment of the New York City BPP membership (and probably nationwide) were workers who held everyday jobs. Other segments of the membership were semi-proletariat, students, youths, and lumpen-proletariat. The lumpen tendencies within some members were what the establishment’s media (and some party members) played up the most. Lumpen tendencies are associated with lack of discipline, liberal use of alcohol, marijuana, and curse words, loose sexual morals, a criminal mentality, and rash actions. These tendencies in some Party members provided the media with better opportunities than they would otherwise have had to play up this aspect, and to slander the Party, which diverted public attention from much of the positive work done by the BPP. Dogmatism: Early successes made some Panthers feel that they were the only possessors of absolute truths. Some became arrogant and dogmatic in their dealings with Party members, other organizations, and even the community. This turned people off. Failure to organize economic foundations in the community: The BPP preached socialist politics. It was anti-capitalist and this skewed its concept of building economic foundations in the community. The Party often gave the impression that to engage in any business enterprise was to engage in capitalism and it too frequently looked with disdain upon the small business people in the community. As a result, the BPP built few businesses which generated income other than The Black Panther newspaper, or which could provide self-employment to its membership and to people in the community. The BPP failed to encourage the Black community to set up its own businesses as a means of building an independent economic foundation which could help break “outsiders’” control of the Black community’s economics and move it toward economic self-reliance. TV mentality: The ’60s were times of great flux. A significant segment of the U.S. population engaged in mass struggle. The Black Liberation, Native American, Puerto Rican, Asian, Chicano, anti-war, white revolutionary, and women’s liberation movements were all occurring more or less simultaneously during this era. It appears that this sizable flux caused some Panthers to think that a seizure of state power was imminent or that a revolutionary struggle is like a quick-paced TV program. That is, it comes on at 9:00 p.m., builds to a crescendo by 9:45, and by 9:55 victory! All in time to make the 10 o’clock news. When it didn’t happen after a

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few years—that is, Afrikans in the U.S. still were not free, no revolution occurred, and worse the BPP was everywhere on the defensive, taking losses, and riddled with dissension—many members became demoralized, disillusioned, and walked away or went back to old lifestyles. They were not psychologically prepared for a long struggle. In hindsight, it appears that the BPP didn’t do enough to root out this TV mentality in some members. But it did in others, which is an aspect to ponder on. Although the BPP made serious errors it also gained a considerable measure of success and made several significant new contributions to the BLM. The final judgment of history may very well show that in its own way the BPP added the final ingredient to the Black agenda necessary to attain real freedom—armed struggle—and that this was the great turning point which ultimately set the Black Liberation Movement on the final road to victory.

SENSES OF FREEDOM Sundiata Acoli August 31, 2014, FCI Cumberland, Maryland

Freedom FEELS sublime like a slow Sunday morn in the springtime of your lover. The kids are outside delighting in the new turn of the tide and each other. Children are priceless again, women are liberated. All races are respected and the people placated. SOUNDS of a Sax Supreme, riffs of laughter, Salsa and Country themes all syncopate with the Trane. Indigenous drums toll: “The Long War’s Over” as soft wind chimes knell in matching refrain. No “Shots fired!” today. No mother crying for her child. No stroll thru the morgue tonight. 85

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Just the best nightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sleep in a long while. Aromas of fine wines and SCENTS of baked breads draw the masses to dine outdoors in the street. The Haves share freely with the Nots now as both have equally when they meet. No need for snatching, grabbing or fighting to be first. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s enough for all now in this wisely-shared universe. A TASTE of honey on earth, sweeter than the sweetest pastry, milk, or sugar tea. People living free, controlling their own lives and destiny, as it should be. Looking back, SIGHTING ahead to a legacy of lightings delayed by theft. But back on path at last, seeking keys from the present past to the age-old mysteries of LOVE & JOY, LIFE and DEATH.

STILL BELIEVING IN LAND AND INDEPENDENCE Sekou Odinga

In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. I bear witness that there is no God but Allah, Creator and Sustainer of all the Universe. He alone deserves the worship and He alone deserves the praise. And I bear witness that Muhammad ibn Abdullah is His last Prophet and slave servant. From the early summer of 1970 and onward I was in Algeria. I was there to help open the Black Panther Party’s International Section. Our responsibility was the accumulation and dissemination of information. Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver were there, Donald Cox (Field Marshall D.C.), Larry Mack, and a few others were there, but it was a fairly small group at that time. We wanted to gather information from various political formations, front line anti-colonial struggles, such as the MPLA of Angola, ANC of South Africa, ZANU and ZAPU of Zimbabwe, and the Palestinians (PLO). There were also representatives of progressive and revolutionary governments—the Chinese government was there, and the North Vietnamese were as well—almost all progressive or left-leaning governments were there. Algeria had opened its doors and invited all progressive movements to come, gather, and work together. Initially, the Algerian government was very active in supporting the work. Not only did it give us a building where we 87

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could open our office, it also gave us a little stipend to help us maintain that office. We were able to have conversations, to build international relations just by being there with each other in the capital. We were reading all the information coming from the liberation movements and progressive governments and sharing the Black Panther news with other oppressed peoples. Most reported on the ways in which their struggles were going, how their struggles were proceeding, what their goals were. Most of them today, other than the Palestinians, are independent states. The Palestinians and New Afrikans in America are about the only ones who have not yet achieved self-determination: land and independence. We initially were able to do a lot of things; we traveled a lot—we went to the Congo, North Korea, China, Egypt, and other places. I went to Kuwait for the Second International Symposium on Palestine, held in February 1971. We worked with Palestinian student groups there. I went to Egypt and Lebanon a number of times, and the International Section was able to send representatives to a number of other places. I remember meeting a Palestinian comrade named Abu, who was based in Egypt. He provided all kinds of help to us. He was a relatively young man, mid-thirties, who had been on the front lines and was wanted in Israel. He was a real good comrade who invited us to meet his people in Egypt and in a number of other countries. He was a revolutionary who believed in international solidarity. He believed that our struggle was part and parcel of his struggle. Abu approached us with open arms and wanted to help in any way that he could. We also met with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. After a couple of years in Algeria the U.S. government, represented by Robert McNamara (then president of the World Bank and former U.S. secretary of defense), made a political and financial deal with the Algerian government to help them develop their natural gas. When Algeria actually signed the contract, one of the conditions that the U.S. asked for was that we be turned over to them. A number of us had cases pending against us—Larry Mack, Cetewayo (Michael Tabor), and myself of the Panther 21, Donald Cox, or D.C. as we called him, and Pete O’Neal from Kansas City. Algeria refused to give us up, but McNamara came up with a compromise: at the very least, he wanted the Algerians to shut us up. He told them: “You can’t let them keep putting out all this negative information about the U.S. government.” The Algerians did agree to that, and at one point they actually put us under house arrest, demanding that we give up any arms that we might have. They interrupted our telex service, which was the main way we were able to easily communicate with the outside world.

Still Believing in Land and Independence

Some of us decided that it was time to leave. We no longer felt completely safe in Algeria. Some of us decided to go to France, others to Tanzania, still others to Zambia. And some of us continued the work in Algeria. Larry Mack and I came back to the U.S. We decided to come back because Amerikkka is where our struggle was, where we felt we could be most effective. This was after the acquittal of the Panther 21 on all charges (May 13, 1971), but we thought that—because the FBI’s and police attacks, and because of renegade Panthers—our lives were still in danger. Although I don’t really remember how I felt upon hearing of the acquittal of the NY 21, I’m sure I was very happy. Because it was a clear victory; I definitely felt that. It was a clear-cut political victory. The government had pulled out a lot of stops to try to get a conviction and had failed. I always felt that if the jury was not totally right-wing dogs they would find us not guilty because the charges were so outrageous. They didn’t make sense—that we were these hardcore revolutionaries, trying to blow up department stores and the Botanical Gardens with our own people in them! The Panther 21 arrest was a very strategically important one for the state, and for our movement as well. The powers that be wanted to interrupt the revolutionary work that the New York Black Panther Party was doing. They identified the more radical leaders within New York and were able to disrupt our activities—the children’s programs, the clothing drives, the food drives, the welfare program, the free health clinics, etc. Instead of those programs moving forward, now we would have to concentrate on getting our Black Panther Party leadership out of jail. A lot of people at that time came to prominence through the Panther 21 case. That’s when people nationally first heard of Jamal Joseph and Afeni Shakur, during their public speaking. The 21 case was important because of the many ways it helped shape our movement. Even though a lot of people still don’t know about it, I think this is important history. I always felt like the charges against the Panther 21 were more of a ploy to get us off the streets and to bankrupt us, rather than to actually find us guilty. But I also always knew that there was a possibility that we could be found guilty even though the charges were outrageous. It wasn’t beyond the pale, since so many other people were found guilty of outrageous acts that we thought people should have known were bullshit. The U.S. government did achieve the goal of getting a lot of the leadership of the NY Black Panther Party off of the street. It did even more than they thought it would do—it probably precipitated the split within the Party. One of the big issues which came up at that time was how the funds that were being raised specifically for the NY 21 were being used. The BPP Central

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Committee (CC) in California was insisting that all funds collected by any Panthers come to them. Whatever we collected was to go straight to them, and then they’d send back whatever they deemed necessary. And they didn’t seem to deem anything necessary! Huey Newton was in jail when we first started to complain about this. Huey initially was sympathetic to the plight of the NY 21 while he was in jail. BPP Chief of Staff David Hilliard was the main one who insisted that the money go through him. Once Huey got out, however, he too adopted David’s position, and they weren’t sending any money back to New York. We had people in jail with large bail, and much of the money had been specifically raised for their bail. Being in Algeria at the time, Cetewayo, Larry and I insisted that our section, the International Section, take up our plight. We were able to get the International Section to demand that the money raised for the bail—at least a major part of it—go toward what it was raised for. That demand precipitated a contradiction between the International Section “led by” Eldridge Cleaver and the BPP Central Committee. I put the words “led by” in quotes because it wasn’t actually only led by Eldridge; we operated more under democratic conditions, so we made collective decisions. We consistently voted to support the NY 21 position at a time when divisions were beginning. The first big difference arose when the NY 21 put out a statement, a January 1971 “Open Letter to the Weather Underground”—the “mother country” radical organization that had grown out of Students for a Democratic Society. The statement was critical of the racism we saw in all white movements, and—while wishing them revolutionary victory—it cautioned them to remember that “the degree of racial co-existence greatly depends on your successes.” The West Coast didn’t like that we were critically supportive of Weather, and especially didn’t like that we asserted our criticism without asking them first. Our position was that we didn’t need to ask them; we reserved the right to have our own opinions. There were a lot of issues between East and West that were coming to a head. There were issues about where Huey was living and how much rent he was paying while so many rank-and-file Panthers were living collectively in virtual poverty. There were concerns about how Huey was treating people and many other things that bothered us. But the issues around the NY 21 brought it all to a splitting point. The period was very tumultuous, but it wasn’t just about the times. We felt that the more power and money Huey got the softer he got. We read this as Huey becoming more reformist, developing bourgeois tendencies which weren’t compatible with what we had been taught and were teaching. He was becoming very dictatorial, demanding that he be called the

Still Believing in Land and Independence

“Supreme Commander.” At this time, it seemed like Huey was mainly thinking about and talking about himself: “I did this, and I did that: I, I, I.” But the straw that broke the camel’s back was the money issue regarding the NY 21. The CC began by expelling one of us, then another. Finally, they said that everyone from the NY 21 was expelled. We in Algeria disagreed with that and put out a written statement supporting fully the NY 21 position. Huey took that as insubordination and expelled the entire International Section. We were supposed to have a public coming together over the radio—between Huey and those of us in Algeria. Actually, we blindsided him. He thought we were coming on to reconcile, but we came on with our criticisms and he was mad as hell. Ultimately, we just brought the split—which was clearly already there—out into the open. In 1973, the BPP in New York City was still officially in existence, but was dying. The Harlem office closed. After the death of Sam Napier, a leader from the West Coast who was working in NY, everything just became an armed struggle among ourselves. Some of us at this time began shifting into the Black Liberation Army (BLA). It was a time of war. Those who were inclined to rumble went (or were already) underground. I thought that building a clandestine, underground capacity was necessary. Although I was still underground, I would have surfaced if I believed with any confidence that I could have done so without being captured and imprisoned. I had a family, and though I did see them occasionally I couldn’t see them on any regular basis. I wanted to. The illegal Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of the U.S. government seemed so effective that work above ground was no longer strategic. We couldn’t work under the banner of the Black Panther Party, which was at war with itself. A clandestine movement could bring about political consequences when the people were attacked by the state. Much like it is today, the state apparatus (federal, state, and local police and sheriff departments, etc.) were constantly brutalizing and murdering people of color, especially radical Black people. Leading members of the BPP were primary targets, like Chicago’s Fred Hampton, Los Angeles’s John Huggins and Bunchy Carter, and many others around the country. The police and all the press gloated over the murder of Panthers. We were under siege. The BLA units that I worked with were semiautonomous or completely autonomous. Some of them had members from out of the Party; actually, most of those I worked with had at least one or two members who had been in the Party. But all of them also had members who hadn’t been in the Party. All of us believed in the need to build a clandestine response; in fact, the BLA was just one response. Some units, especially from the South, weren’t BLA at all. All of

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us had a political consciousness around the need for the potential for retaliation—that there should be some consequences to the actions of the police and the government. Some folks just wanted to fight back. Police say that their own violence is justifiable homicide. We said, “It’s not justifiable to kill unarmed schoolchildren like Clifford Glover, or grandmothers a bit late on their rent like Eleanor Bumpurs.” We said, “It’s not justifiable to kill unarmed civilians.” We said, “There would be consequences for that kind of state murder.” As for me, I believed in land and independence. And I still believe that freedom is based on land and independence! ** The case of the Panther 21 has always been important as a historical factor in New Afrikan people’s movement for land and independence. Our case was one of the first major political cases that had a large number of Black radical political prisoners. Twenty-one were indicted, thirteen actually locked up for a long period of time. It was important to understand why the state did it and some of the effects of locking us up. It was a prelude to the split in the BPP itself; a lot of contradictions were brought forward from people in the NY 21 when they talked about where money was going. As I said before, I think the government knew that they didn’t have much of a case, but that we’d have to fight the case. To do that, they knew we’d have to take people off the streets who were very effective organizing on the streets. The 21 was a collection of revolutionary Black men and women, and most of these radicals continued to work in radical politics, radical struggle. Some of us went underground and took up arms to defend the community. In that sense, there was a continuum; it never stopped. Maybe it got quiet; some people had been forgotten. Sometimes we didn’t want things to be in the limelight; the less people thought about them, the more the people underground were able to do. One thing we know is that Assata Shakur was liberated. What some might not know is that I was convicted of aiding in Assata’s liberation. I was accused of going into the Clinton Correctional Facility in New Jersey and bringing her out. That probably wouldn’t have been possible if my picture had been flashed around in the media, with my name ringing out. But the continuity of struggle never stopped—even though most people didn’t know what was going on. The work I’m trying to do today is to legally help free those still in prison for their political beliefs and activities—political prisoners and prisoners of war. It’s not just personal—those inside are part of our movement. We are all

Still Believing in Land and Independence

part of the same movement. Our movement, although crippled, is still alive. People are still struggling; Black/New Afrikan people are still oppressed. We are still at the bottom of the system: All the negatives that were there in the 1960s still are here today. It’s important that those of us who are part of the movement, who are no longer dealing with armed struggle, continue to deal with our struggle on whatever level we can. We can deal with, and I choose to deal with, the work to free political prisoners. The work to free political prisoners is especially important work for all those who were a part of the Black Panther Party/Black Liberation Movement. It’s important for those both inside and out to know that people haven’t forgotten, that there is a struggle still going on. Our struggle to get the Panther political prisoners and others out is a struggle to keep the movement moving. It must remain a priority. Young people need to know that they can’t do it alone. They need to be organized, and they need to be clear about what their goals are. They need to be goal-oriented, and to have long-term and short-term goals. Short-terms goals, of course, need to be conducive to accomplishing the long-term goals. Black and New Afrikan people in particular need to know who we are—where we came from, where we’re at, but also where we want to go. We need to be clear about what freedom means. Does freedom mean a $60,000–100,000 a year job? Does freedom mean being able to go to any school we want? Does freedom mean land and independence? I think a cultural revolution is needed to help us identify what freedom means. When we talk about Black people, African people, and New Afrikan people, we need to know who we are. If I asked any of my white allies what’s their nationality, they probably would tell me exactly what it is. But if you ask ten Black people what their nationality is, you probably will get four or five answers—if not more. I think we need a cultural revolution; a cultural revolution should be able to make that clear—how we’re going to get to where we need to be. I talk about a cultural revolution in part because it’s widely “acceptable.” It’s something that I can talk to the preacher about, I can talk to the Rabbi about, I can talk to the Imam about, I can talk to the social worker about, I can talk to the policeman about—because anybody who has any interest in the people, in Black/New Afrikan people, won’t have a problem with a cultural revolution. Plus, culture is what binds a people together—what makes a people a people: same language, same history, same land, etc. So it is in fact not just acceptable, but I think a necessary analysis of what I’m talking about. What do I say to young people today? Organize, organize, organize! I say that again and again. And to study: study your history—ancient and modern.

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Too many of us don’t know who Lumumba Shakur was, who Zayd Shakur was. It’s a shame, but most of our youth don’t even really know who Malcolm X was, other than that he was someone who stood against the system. But if you ask them, “What did he stand for?” very few of them can tell you. And there aren’t that many who can tell you what Martin Luther King really stood for, if you ask them, “What did he do that makes you like him?” We don’t study our history. We have other people teaching us who we are, people who don’t have our interests at heart. If people don’t know who they are, it’s easy for them to destroy one another. That’s why you see our kids killing each other and laughing about it, not even caring. They don’t recognize that they’re beefing with themselves; they’re fighting themselves; they’re killing themselves. They don’t know that that’s their brother—for real, that’s their brother. With study and organization, with widespread cultural revolution, it becomes clear that we can’t get freedom without land and independence.

THE LAST OF THE LOUD NEW AND REVISED COMMENTARY Dhoruba Bin Wahad

Comrades Sekou Odinga and Dhoruba Bin Wahad gave tribute and thanks at the 2016 New York memorial service for Panther 21 member Afeni Shakur, held at Brooklyn’s House of the Lord Church and organized by Senior Minister Rev. Dr. Herbert Daughtry, NYC City Councilman Charles Barron, and fellow 21 defendant Jamal Joseph. Both devout Muslims, Sekou and Dhoruba began their remarks giving praise; Dhoruba went on to address the assembled crowd, characterizing their intergenerational differences and common points. This excerpt of Dhoruba’s remarks provides an introduction to three recently written essays by Dhoruba revised or excerpted for this publication. All praise to Allah. There is no God but Allah. I am a servant of Allah. I thank Allah for giving me life, for giving me strength. And most of all, I thank Allah for giving me people like you as comrades, as brothers and sisters who have fought beside us, who have died for our cause, and who stand today in strength and in solidarity. We were the last of the loud. We got in crackers’ faces. We told them what our rights were. We demanded respect. But most of all, we were the last of the loud. It was in the struggle that we gained our identity. We remember Afeni 95

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Shakur, but we know also that Afeni was a product of our tradition, a product of our struggle: of our blood, of our tears, of our pain. We are the last of the loud. We stand on the shoulders of those of went before us, who suffered for us, who died for us, and who fought for us. So when we have a memorial, it’s not just a celebration of who passed; it’s a celebration of the generation that is coming as well because we are the last of the loud but they are the first of the bold, of a new generation. And I want to say here, on behalf of my Comrade Afeni, that her spirit resides in those young people whom she nurtured, whom she touched. And they will take her to the next step, to the next level. Our revolutionary Black women have stood at the forefront of struggle since the days of slavery, since the bullwhip days . . . Comrade Afeni stood in the courtroom and nurtured all of our spirits every day with that effervescent smile. She’s not gone; she’s not forgotten; she lives every time we mention her name. I honor my sister and I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be here. I get to remember those times when we stood against the power of the state, and we prevailed. We won . . . We never thought that we’d get this far, have the children that we have and the blessings that we have. This fight ain’t over yet, and it won’t be over until we are free, until we are liberated, until those enemies of the sun are driven down and subjugated . . . We will be free in this place, in this time, and in this age. We were the last of the loud, but we got children, and our children are going to have children, and it ain’t over until it’s over. Power to the people.

URBAN POLICE REPRESSION CRIMINALIZING RESISTANCE AND UNRAVELING THE FBI’S COUNTER INTELLIGENCE PROGRAM, TIMELINE OF EMPIRE, RACIAL PROFILING, POLICE VIOLENCE, AND CLASS Compiled and written by Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Paul Wolf, with contributions from Attorney

Robert Boyle, Bob Brown, Tom Burghardt, Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Jim Vander Wall, Kathleen Cleaver, Bruce Ellison, Cynthia McKinney, Nkechi Taifa, Laura Whitehorn, Nicholas Wilson, and Howard Zinn

In 1966, the New York City Police Department commenced its own investigation of the Black Panther Party. Detective Ralph White of the NYPD was directed to infiltrate the Black Panther Party and submit daily reports on the Party and its members. The NYPD regularly communicated with police departments throughout the country, sharing information on the BPP, its members and activities. The NYPD was also working with the FBI on a daily basis. On August 29, 1968, FBI Special Agent Henry Naehle reported on his meeting with a member of an NYPD “Special Unit” investigating the BPP. SA Naehle acknowledged that the FBI’s New York Field Office (NYO) “has been working closely with BSS in exchanging information of mutual interest and to our mutual advantage.” An FBI “Inspector’s Review” for the first quarter of 1969 shows that the NYPD, in conjunction with the FBI, had an “interview” and “arrest” program as part of their campaign to neutralize and disrupt the BPP. The NYPD advised the FBI that these programs have severely hampered and disrupted the BPP, particularly in Brooklyn where, for a while, BPP operations were at a complete standstill and in fact have never recovered sufficiently to operate effectively. 97

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A series of FBI documents reveal a joint FBI/NYPD plan to gather information on BPP members and their supporters in late 1968. During an unprovoked attack by off-duty members of the NYPD on BPP members attending a court appearance in Brooklyn, the briefcase of BPP leader David Brothers was stolen by the NYPD, its contents photocopied and given to the FBI. Rather than seeking to prosecute the police officers for this theft, the FBI ordered “a review of these names and telephone numbers [so that] appropriate action will be taken.” That “appropriate action” included an effort to label Brothers and two other BPP leaders ( Jorge Aponte and Robert Collier) as police informants. On December 12, 1968, the FBI’s New York Office proposed circulating fliers warning the community of the “DANGER” posed by Brothers, Collier, and Aponte. The NYO proposed that the fliers “be left in restaurants that Negroes are known to frequent (Chock Full O’Nuts, etc.).” BSS later told the FBI that its proposal was successful in that David Brothers had come under suspicion by the BPP. An FBI memorandum dated December 2, 1968, captioned “Counterintelligence Program,” lists several operations during the previous two-week period. It closes by stating that “every effort is being made in the NYO to misdirect the operations of the BPP on a daily basis.” In August 1968, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, then known as Richard Dhoruba Moore, joined the BPP and within a few months was promoted to a position of leadership. He was soon identified by the Bureau and by the NYPD as a “key agitator” and placed in the FBI’s “Security Index,” “Agitator Index,” and “Black Nationalist Photograph Album.” FBI supervisors instructed the NYO to “develop better liaison and closer working relationship with the NYPD” in their investigation of Dhoruba Bin Wahad. On April 2, 1969, Bin Wahad and twenty other members of the Black Panther Party were indicted on charges of conspiracy in the so-called Panther 21 case. An NYPD memorandum notes that the Panther 21 arrests were considered a “summation” of the overt and covert investigation commenced in 1966. In a biweekly report to FBI Headquarters listing several counterintelligence operations, the FBI reported: “To date, the NYO has conducted over 500 interviews with BPP members and sympathizers. Additionally, arrests of BPP members have been made by Bureau agents and the NYPD. These interviews and arrests have helped disrupt and cripple the activities of the BPP in the NYC area. Every effort will be made to continue pressure on the BPP.” In July 1969, the NYPD sent officers to Oakland, California, to monitor the Black Panther Party’s nationwide conference calling for community control of police departments. An NYPD memorandum candidly acknowledged

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that community control of the police “may not be in the interests of the department.” Through its warrantless wiretaps of BPP telephones, the FBI learned that the BPP was trying to raise the $100,000 bail that had been set for Bin Wahad, whose release was considered by the BPP to be a priority over the other twenty defendants due to his leadership role in the organization. Fundraising efforts were impeded by FBI/NYPD counterintelligence operations. For example, following a fundraiser at the home of conductor Leonard Bernstein, the FBI sent falsified letters to those in attendance in order to “thwart the aims and efforts of the BPP in their attempt to solicit money from socially prominent groups.” Unable to raise bail, Dhoruba Bin Wahad spent the next year incarcerated. The FBI continued to target BPP community programs. For example, the FBI pressured several churches not to institute the BPP’s free breakfast for children program in their parishes. In September 1969, an NYPD BSS representative told the FBI that the BPP was disintegrating in New York. By March 1970, the BPP had raised enough money to post bail for the most articulate leaders and chose Mr. Bin Wahad for release. The FBI ordered that he be immediately and continuously surveilled and that donors of bail money be identified. Director Hoover reminded his New York Office that the activities of Panther 21 defendants were of “vital interest” to the “seat of government.” Through their warrantless eavesdropping on BPP offices and residences, the FBI became aware in May 1970 of dissatisfaction among New York BPP members, including Bin Wahad, with West Coast BPP members. A COINTELPRO operation prepared by the New Haven Field Office and submitted to the FBI’s New York Office consisted of an FBI-fabricated note wherein Bin Wahad accused BPP leader Robert Bay of being an informant. This successful operation resulted in Dhoruba Bin Wahad’s demotion within the BPP. Aware of his disillusionment, the FBI disseminated information regarding BPP strife to the media and participated in a plan to either recruit Bin Wahad as an informant or have BPP members believe he was an agent for the FBI. In August 1970, BPP leader Huey P. Newton was released from prison. A plethora of counterintelligence actions followed which sought to make Newton suspicious of fellow BPP members, particularly those, like Bin Wahad, who were on the East Coast. By early 1971, the plan bore fruit. On January 28, 1971, FBI Director Hoover reported that Newton had become increasingly paranoid and had expelled several loyal BPP members:

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This operation was enormously successful, resulting in a split within the BPP with violent repercussions. In early January 1971, Fred Bennett, a BPP member affiliated with the New York chapter, was shot and killed, allegedly by Newton supporters. Newton came to believe that Bin Wahad was plotting to kill him. Bin Wahad, in turn, was told by Connie Matthews, Newton’s secretary, that Newton was planning to have Bin Wahad and Panther 21 codefendants Edward Joseph and Michael Tabor killed during Newton’s upcoming East Coast speaking tour. As a result of the split and fearing for his life, Bin Wahad, along with Tabor and Joseph, was forced to flee during the Panther 21 trial. On May 13, 1971, the Panther 21, including Dhoruba Bin Wahad, were acquitted of all charges in the less than one hour of jury deliberations, following what was at that time the longest trial in New York City history. BSS Detective Edwin Cooper begrudgingly reported to defendant Michael Codd that the case “was not proven to the jury’s satisfaction.” Alarmed and embarrassed by the acquittal, Director Hoover ordered an “intensification” of the investigations of acquitted Panther 21 members with special emphasis on those, like Bin Wahad, who were fugitives. On May 19, 1971, NYPD Officers Thomas Curry and Nicholas Binetti were shot on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Two nights later, two other officers, Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini, were shot and killed in Harlem. In separate communiqués delivered to the media, the Black Liberation Army claimed responsibility for both attacks. Immediately after these shootings, the FBI made the investigation of these incidents—called “Newkill”—a part of their long-standing program against the BPP. Before any evidence had been collected, BPP members—in particular those acquitted in the Panther 21 case—were targeted as suspects. Hoover instructed the New York FBI Office to consider the possibility that both attacks may be the result of revenge taken against NYC police by the Black Panther Party (BPP) as a result of its arrest of BPP members in April 1969 (i.e., the Panther 21 case). On May 26, 1971, J. Edgar Hoover met with then-president Richard Nixon, who told Hoover that he wanted to make sure that the FBI did not “pull any punches in going all out in gathering information . . . on the situation

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in New York.” Hoover informed his subordinates that Nixon’s interest and the FBI’s involvement were to be kept strictly confidential. “Newkill” was a joint FBI/NYPD operation involving total cooperation and sharing of information. The FBI made all its facilities and resources, including its laboratory, available to the NYPD. In turn, NYPD Chief of Detectives Albert Seedman, who coordinated the NYPD’s investigation, ordered his subordinates to give the FBI “all available information developed to date, as well as in future investigations.” On June 5, 1971, Bin Wahad was arrested during a robbery of a Bronx after hours “social club,” a hangout for local drug merchants. Seized from inside the social club was a .45 caliber machine gun. Although the initial ballistics test on the weapon failed to link it with the Curry-Binetti shooting, the NYPD publicly declared they had seized the weapon used in May 19. The NYPD now had in custody a well-known and vocal Black Panther leader and the alleged weapon linked to a police shooting. His prosecution and conviction would both neutralize an effective leader and justify the failed Panther 21 case. But there was no direct evidence linking Bin Wahad to the shooting. Pauline Joseph, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, became the prosecution’s star witness. Ms. Joseph first surfaced when she made a phone call to the NYPD on June 12, 1971, supplying her name and address and stating that Bin Wahad and Edward Joseph (a Panther 21 defendant who jumped bail with Bin Wahad) were innocent of the Curry-Binetti shooting. She told the police that Bin Wahad “did not do it, either the Riverside Drive [Curry-Binetti] shooting or the 32nd precinct [Piagentini-Jones] shooting.” The first person to arrive at Ms. Joseph’s apartment was NYPD Lieutenant Kenneth Sauer, the head of the 24th Precinct detective squad. Contrary to her testimony at trial, Ms. Joseph continued to maintain that Bin Wahad was innocent of the Curry-Binetti shooting. Later that day she was interviewed by BSS Detective Edwin Cooper. Joseph repeated that Bin Wahad was innocent. Ms. Joseph was arrested, and committed as a material witness. For nearly two years she remained in the exclusive custody of the New York County District Attorney’s Office. She was repeatedly interviewed by state and federal authorities. While in the custody of the district attorney, Joseph was recruited as a “racial informant” for the FBI. She was paid for her services and housed first in a hotel and then in a furnished apartment, paid for by the district attorney. Despite her mental health issues, Pauline Joseph became the prosecution’s star witness in the case. Dhoruba Bin Wahad was indicted for the attempted murder of Officers Curry and Binetti on July 30, 1971. Although the NYPD and FBI continu-

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ously interviewed Ms. Joseph, and prepared written memoranda of those interviews, the assistant district attorney represented that, except for a one paragraph statement made on the night of her commitment and her grand jury testimony, there were no prior statements. The text of Ms. Joseph’s initial phone call was withheld by the prosecution through two trials. No notes of memoranda of the initial, exculpatory interviews by Lieutenant Sauer and Detective Cooper were ever provided to Bin Wahad. Neither were reports of subsequent interviews during the two years she was in custody. After three trials, Dhoruba Bin Wahad was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced by Justice Martinisto to the maximum penalty, twenty-five years to life. In December 1975, after learning of Congressional hearings which disclosed the FBI’s covert operations against the BPP, Dhoruba Bin Wahad filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court, charging that he had been the victim of numerous illegal and unconstitutional actions designed to “neutralize” him, including the frame-up in the Curry-Binetti case. In 1980, the FBI and NYPD were ordered by the Court to produce their massive files on Mr. Bin Wahad and the BPP, that they had claimed did not exist. The FBI and NYPD documents revealed that Mr. Bin Wahad was indeed a target of FBI/NYPD covert operations and, for the first time, depicted the FBI’s intimate involvement in the Curry-Binetti investigation. The “Newkill” file, which was finally produced in unredacted form in 1987, after twelve years of litigation, contains numerous reports which should have been provided to Dhoruba Bin Wahad during his trial. In a decision announced December 20, 1992, Justice Bruce Allen of the New York State Supreme Court ordered a new trial. The court exhaustively analyzed the prosecution’s circumstantial case, particularly the testimony of Pauline Joseph. The court found that the inconsistencies and omissions in the prior statements contradicted testimony “crucial to establishing the People’s theory of the case.” The inconsistencies, said the Court, “went beyond mere details” and involve “what one would expect to have been the most memorable aspects of [the night of the shooting].” On January 19, 1995, the District Attorney moved to dismiss the indictment, acknowledging that the prosecution could not prove its case. The indictment was dismissed. After more than twenty years in prison, Mr. Bin Wahad is at liberty today, residing in Accra, Ghana, and Atlanta, Georgia.

ASSATA SHAKUR, EXCLUDING THE NIGHTMARE AFTER THE DREAM THE “TERRORIST” LABEL AND THE CRIMINALIZATION OF REVOLUTIONARY BLACK MOVEMENTS IN THE USA Dhoruba Bin Wahad

Americans live at a time when the history of those who have been cheated, murdered, or excluded is being destroyed. Eliminated from this history are the collective narratives of struggle, resistance, and rebellion against various forms of authoritarianism. —Henry Giroux, The Ghost of Authoritarianism in the Age of the Shutdown At a press conference in May 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that it was designating Assata Shakur ( JoAnne Chesimard) as one of its top ten most-wanted “terrorists.” Assata escaped from a New Jersey prison in 1979 and thereafter surfaced in Cuba where she was granted political asylum. The “terrorist” designation, and the media hoopla surrounding it, has significant historical and political implications. While numerous progressive individuals and organizations correctly denounced that designation, recognizing that it was, in part, an attack on Cuba, far too many progressive and civil rights advocates have missed the greater and more pernicious historical revisionism and racist political implications behind the rebranding of Assata Shakur as a “terrorist.” Many people fighting for human rights, who oppose President Barack Obama’s policies of “rendition,” torture (which is euphemistically termed 103

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“enhanced interrogation technique”), indefinite detention, state sponsored murder by remote control vehicles (drones), have simultaneously called upon Obama to remove Shakur’s “terrorist” designation, arguing that Assata is innocent of the murder charges that resulted from her 1973 arrest. Many of these same people opposed Obama’s illegally conducted “war on terror” and oppose the murder and detention of so-called militants and jihadists without according them legal due process, recognizing that those targeted by the U.S. are in fact members of “movements” targeted more generally by the U.S. government who would not be otherwise targeted as individuals. Yet notably missing from most public statements decrying Assata’s designation as a “terrorist,” and unlike the connections made in terms of foreign policy, were attempts to place Assata’s case, and the “terrorist” designation, in the political and cultural context of the Black Liberation Movement in the United States. By contrast, officials at the highest level of government have little trouble placing the movements of the sixties in a different context. President Obama, during his speech commemorating the 1963 March on Washington, recounted his version of the sixties, claiming Black people lost their way when “legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior.” What was Obama talking about? Who was he referring to? What Blacks used police brutality to somehow mask criminal activity? Though he never said it directly, clearly Obama was referring to the Black Panther Party. But his comments speak volumes when juxtaposed to the actions of his own Justice Department. In an effort to appease domestic law enforcement, Obama sanctioned his Justice Department’s targeting of Assata Shakur, intensifying the designation of her and her movement as “terrorists.” Rather than open up a discussion on the excesses of the sixties and seventies to discern who were the real criminals and assassins—the architects of COINTELPRO or the movements they illegally infiltrated and destroyed— both supporters and detractors of Assata distort, exclude, and ignore the movement from which she emerged. This essay is an attempt to place the “terrorist” designation and Assata’s case in a historical and political context—a context that also significantly impacts the status of Black political prisoners in the United States today.

The Black Liberation (Nationalist), Civil Right (Integrationist), and Pan-African Movements circa 1960–1975 To begin, it is necessary to step into a time capsule and head back to the 1960s. The following history is not intended to be definitive or complete. But this

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is a history that is relatively unknown—or, if known, deliberately twisted by some who may have benefited from the distortion of Black ’60s activism. That is why it is important to review the era now defined as a watershed period in American racial and political history, the tumultuous sixties. The 1960s and early 1970s was a period of significant social upheaval. Globally, former European colonial powers (all members of North Atlantic Treaty Organization) were locked in the false dichotomy of the Cold War and the struggle to reassert their control over the resources of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The Cold War geopolitically divided the world into two hostile camps: the Euro-Russian and Sino-Communist East (led by Moscow and Beijing) versus the West led by the USA and its NATO allies. The front line of this global contest after the Korean War (1950–1954) and the French expulsion from its colonial position in Southeast Asia was Vietnam. The U.S. pursuing a policy of “containment of communism” took on the “white man’s burden” of the French in Vietnam and introduced a massive military presence to thwart the Vietnamese Independence movement. By 1965, the Vietnamese people were winning a war of liberation against the most powerful military force in history. (We note the 2013 passing of the liberation movement’s great leader Võ Nguyên Giáp). Movements within the United States—Black, Native American, Puerto Rican, Mexican—were waging similar struggles that, over time, took on an increasingly anti-imperialist character. This inspired masses of white people, primarily youth, to question the very foundations of United States society. The women’s liberation and LGBT movements also grew out of this context. Indeed, it was militant nationalist organizations such as the RNA, BPP, SNCC, which vocally opposed U.S. militarism abroad and the Vietnam War, prior to Dr. Martin Luther King’s denunciation of American involvement in Vietnam as amoral and capitalism as exploitive. These were the forces and events that, by 1966, defined the historical and geopolitical conditions that shaped the great civil and human rights movements of middle 20th century. Inspired by the example of the martyred El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X), Robert Williams,1 and the original Black Panthers of Lowndes 1 Robert F. Williams was president of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP, which was working to integrate the public swimming pools. They organized peaceful demonstrations, but some drew gunfire. No one was arrested or punished, although law enforcement officers were present. Williams had already started a Black Armed Guard to defend the local Black community from racist activity. KKK membership numbered some 15,000 locally. Black residents fortified their homes with sandbags and trained to use rifles in the event of night raids by the Klan. In Negroes with Guns, Williams writes: “[R]acists consider themselves superior beings and are not willing to

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County Alabama,2 the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. In just a few months after its inception the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense emerged as a significant influence on “New Left” and radical politics in America and as one of the most popular organizations, and romanticized groups, in the Black community. The BPP developed a ten-point political program based on the conditions of African American and poor people in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California, and across the nation. However, the BPP’s emphasis on community control of institutions within the Black community, including education, health care, and housing, resonated with urban Blacks everywhere because institutional racism lay at the very basis of racial and political inequality nationally, not only in the Bay Area. Blacks in Oakland and its adjacent communities had migrated from the South and Southwest, to serve as labor battalions during World War II. The naval base adjacent to Oakland and the Port of San Francisco played a primary logistical role in the U.S. war effort against Imperial Japan during World War II (1941–45). Black workers, arriving from the South to work as laborers for the war effort, were red-lined into specific residential areas. These Black worker communities were policed by racist and brutal police officers—themselves recent migrants from the deep South, mainly from Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. It should surprise no one exchange their superior lives for our inferior ones. They are most vicious and violent when they can practice violence with impunity. . . . It has always been an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our Western states proves, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order the citizens can and must act in self-defense against lawless violence.” Followers attested to Williams’s advocating the use of advanced powerful weaponry rather than more traditional firearms. Williams insisted his position was defensive, as opposed to a declaration of war. He called it “armed self-reliance” in the face of white terrorism. Threats against Williams’s life and his family became more frequent. In 1959, Williams debated the merits of nonviolence with Martin Luther King Jr. at the NAACP convention. The national NAACP office suspended his local chapter presidency for six months because of his outspoken disagreements with the national leadership. He said his wife would take over his position and he would continue his leadership through her. 2 The Lowndes County Freedom Organization, or Black Panther Party, was a short-lived political party that formed in 1966 to represent African Americans in the central Alabama Black Belt counties. Though the organization failed to win any election, its influence was felt far beyond Alabama by providing the foundation for the better-known Black Panther Party for Self-Defense that arose in Oakland, California. Although the population was roughly 80 percent African American, no Black resident had successfully registered to vote in more than 60 years, as the county was controlled by 86 white families which owned 90 percent of the land.

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then that the BPP 10-Point Program and Platform addressed the existential reality of Black people as workers and as “cannon fodder” for U.S. militarism. One point of the BPP program called for the end to the military draft of all Black men. Another point called for a plebiscite in the Black community to determine whether Black people wished to remain part of the United States. This point directly addressed the conditional and ambivalent nature of African American perennial second-class “citizenship” that seems up for review every decade or so whenever the contradictions of civil and economic reforms placed undue pressure on white skin privilege. Challenging the conventional dichotomy of race relations in the U.S., the BPP reasoned that if Black people must struggle to reaffirm their “civil rights” every decade and constantly secure new legislation protecting their right to vote, then maybe “citizenship,” e.g. integration, is not synonymous with freedom or empowerment—and national self-determination (community control/decentralization of institutional controls) does in fact mean empowerment. This was the essential reason for proposing a UN-supervised plebiscite in the BPP 10-Point Platform of “What We Want; What We Believe.” Understanding that the right of self-determination for all peoples is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as articles condemning racial repression and genocide, the BPP proclaimed its internationalist tendency from its very inception. Nonetheless the most controversial, vilified, and misrepresented point of the BPP’s 10-Point Program was its recognition of Black people’s inherent right to self-defense, including armed self-defense against racist attack by civilians or the police. In Oakland, California, armed BPP members engaged in the original “cop-watch,” establishing regular armed patrols that followed the police, intervening at a legal distance when the police violated someone’s rights. Fully appreciating how short-lived their right to bear arms in public would be, and instinctively sensing how the power structure of white supremacy would attempt to disconnect the rights of Black self-defense from nonviolent movements for broader civil rights and assimilation—the bread and butter of “responsible Negro leaders”—the BPP embarked on a publicity campaign to emphasize the racist political character and purpose of law enforcement and the legislative process. The BPP’s instincts were verified when, in 1967, in direct response to the BPP, the State of California sought to amend its gun laws to eliminate the right to carry a firearm in open view. (Ironically, the bill was supported by gun rights advocates: the NRA and then Governor Ronald Reagan. After all, it was about taking firearms from Black people!) Indeed, the Bill was called the “Black Panther” Bill. Racially motivated reform from the right threatened to eat its own! On May 2, 1967, the BPP responded by

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sending an armed delegation to the Legislative Office Building in Sacramento challenging the new gun law.3 The image of armed young Black women and men marching in formation on a state capitol circulated like wildfire around the world. Dozens of Black community activists, mainly from the Black and brown ghettos, and from the streets across America, were galvanized by the BPP’s response to the perceived denial of Black people’s right to openly carry arms. Those who were the daily victims of police harassment, violence, and intimidation were attracted to the BPP. These were not just the “criminal minded” or sociopaths as the media and later blaxploitation movies would portray, but in most cases serious activists and organizers in their respective communities. It is not generally understood that the membership and leadership of BPP in cities across the U.S. was comprised of local activists who were involved in their community before 1967. The organizational character of the BPP was also shaped by its ideological and organizational structure. A creation of its era, the BPP was not a “faith-based” messianic movement, or mass-based organization like Garvey’s UNIA, but a cadre-based revolutionary formation that introduced a disparate membership to principles of revolutionary nationalism and internationalism. These characteristics permitted the BPP to become the first Black organization to establish functional relations with liberation movements in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. It is the legacy of those fraternal relationships that serves to protect Assata Shakur in Cuba today. This is one of the reasons why the FBI publicity stunt classifying Assata as a terrorist blatantly attempts to rewrite this history and disparage legitimate movements. When BPP Chapters sprang up throughout the country, the FBI, along with state and local law enforcement agencies, realized that unless the ideas of Black self-defense were completely discredited, demonized, and rejected by the African American populace, it could lead to a sustained uprising of America’s most marginalized and maligned national minority—Africans in America. Barely ten months old in August 1967, the BPP became the FBI’s major target in its expanding COINTELPRO operation against the Black Liberation Movement. The stated purpose of the program according to an August 25, 1967, document was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” Black organizations and their leadership. In March 1968, the pro3 See Adam Winkler, “The Secret History of Guns,” The Atlantic, September 2011, accessed at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secrethistory-of-guns/308608/.

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gram was further expanded to 43 FBI field offices. Those offices were ordered to develop counterintelligence operations designed to prevent the “coalition” of Black groups as well as the rise of a “messiah” who would unify the movement.4 The FBI was also very concerned about the spread of revolutionary ideology among youth. As candidly put by the FBI’s San Francisco field office in April 1968, COINTELPRO must convince youth to buy into the system: The Negro youth and moderate must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching they will be dead revolutionaries. Is it not better to be a sports hero, a well-paid professional athlete or entertainer, or a regularly paid white or blue collar worker, a peaceful human being with a family, or a person who is at least being accepted than a Negro who may have gotten even with the establishment by burning it down, but who along with this burned down his own home and gained for him and all his people the hatred and distrust of the whites for years to come?5

What started out as a general repressive and surveillance program in 1967, by mid-1968 became a campaign to destroy the BPP and its ideology of armed resistance to racist violence. The Black Panther Party was the chief target of COINTELPRO.6 According to a 1976 Senate Report (the Church Committee), the Black Panther Party was targeted in 90 percent of all COINTELPRO actions directed at the Black Liberation Movement. Some of the actions included forcing churches and schools to evict the breakfast program, sending spurious notes to contributors threatening violence, placing false stories in newspapers, manipulating fund raising, using informants to spread false rumors, and other disinformation machinations. BPP members were arrested on the street for selling the newspaper. Police conducted interrogations with no legal basis. In all of this, local police played an integral role.7 As noted in an 4 See FBI airtel from Director to 43 Field Offices, March 4, 1968, captioned “Counterintelligence Program.” 5 See FBI airtel from San Francisco to Director and 42 field offices, April 3, 1968, captioned “Counterintelligence Program.” 6 On December 2, 1968, FBI Director Hoover ordered all field offices to submit bi-weekly memoranda “containing counterintelligence measures aimed against the BPP. The biweekly letter must also contain accomplishments obtained during the twoweek period under captioned program.” See FBI Memorandum from Director to 43 field offices, December 2, 1968 captioned “Counterintelligence Program.” 7 As noted in an FBI Report in early 1969, the FBI had a “program of arresting BPP members. . . . According to the Bureau of Special Services, New York City Police Department (BSS, NYPD) and other sources, these programs have severely hampered

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FBI airtel on December 2, 1968, “every effort is being made to misdirect the activities of the BPP on a daily basis.” Apartments and offices were regularly subjected to search. There were spurious arrests. All BPP offices, and many homes, were subjected to warrantless (and illegal) wiretaps. The organization was flooded by the FBI with informants and police agents who worked as provocateurs. A few days later the BPP office in Los Angeles was attacked by police. False criminal charges were also lodged against BPP local and regional leaders. In April 1969, 21 leading cadre members of the New York City Chapter of the Black Panther Party (author included) were indicted and arrested on conspiracy charges. The so-called Panther 21 case was based solely on the allegations of three undercover NYPD officers who posed as Panther members. One of these undercover Black “BOSSI” (aka BSS) operatives, Detective Gene Roberts, had years earlier infiltrated Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and was on Malcolm’s security detail at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm was gunned downed and killed. The entire Harlem chapter leadership and its regional field secretary, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, were incarcerated. It was at this juncture in the covert and overt repression of the BPP that Assata Shakur, then a student at City College of New York, became active in BPP programs as a National Committees to Combat Fascism (NCCF) medical cadre in Harlem’s Washington Heights.8 Despite escalating state repression and attacks by various Black groups and Black intelligentsia the BPP’s influence continued to grow with each police and reactionary attack on its members and programs. What was once a local BPP newsletter became the “Black Community News Service” and the voice, as well as the revolutionary image, of the BPP. Sales of the BPP newspaper skyrocketed becoming the primary funding source for BPP operations.9 After the armed Sacramento BPP demonstration, the Party dropped and disrupted the BPP.” 8 In May 1971, the Panther 21 defendants that actually went to trial were acquitted of all charges. 9 The FBI quickly understood this. In an August 19, 1970, airtel to the Director captioned “Counterintelligence Program” the FBI’s New York Field Office stated that the New York FBI Office “realizes that one of the most effective Black nationalist propaganda operations is the sale and distribution of the BPP newspaper, The Black Panther in the New York City area. . . . The NYO realizes the importance of negating the financial benefits coming to the BPP through the sale of its newspaper. Continued efforts will be made to derive logical and practical plans to thwart this crucial BPP operation.”

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the hyphenated “for self-defense.” The BPP began national organizing efforts to unify the radical left in America in a common “front” against police brutality, in early 1968. Despite the race and class analysis that drove BPP activities, the organization and the Black Liberation Movement were ill prepared to cope with the historic moment. The BPP’s strategic vision by late 1968 became increasingly focused on the burgeoning corporate police state and what its leading members saw as the precipitous consolidation of corporate, military, and police power that would criminalize and crush future civil unrest, and politically redirect popular antiwar sentiment into more “institutional” avenues of reform. The slogan and war cry of the BPP, “Power to the People, Black Power to Black People,” had distilled in a few words, accompanied by a clenched fist, the sentiments of millions of people who felt controlled and exploited by the white-supremacist state, culture, and political system. But slogans only reflect reality; they do not change it. The BPP, and all progressive movements of the period, were living on the cusp of the historic reformation of two systems of economic and political control: corporate/capitalist democracy and authoritarian state socialism. Both systems, fundamentally hierarchal and elitist, would ultimately coalesce into variations of national security state model that typify both so-called “democratic” (Western) and “authoritarian” (Eastern) states today.

Creating a New Generation of Black Reformers Before stepping down as president, Lyndon B. Johnson (after consultation with “Black leaders”: businessmen, and politicians) launched his “War on Poverty,” opening up the coffers of the government to anyone who could calm the Ghetto Fires (rebellions) that each year consumed urban America and tarnished the image of the U.S. as a democracy. Employing government and corporate largess to capital-starved Black inner-city communities had immediate political consequences. Radical change was out—and liberal reformism was in. The class nature of many Black institutions became the determining factor in race politics. The dividing of the Black liberation/civil rights movement along class lines would mean that the Panthers faced immediate and imminent class opposition from newly minted “anti-poverty pimps” and apolitical organizations eager for government funding. The launching of the War on Poverty significantly affected the grassroots Black narrative of “Black Power” versus integration politics and African American subservience to the twoparty system. The money and “access” to white corporate America provided

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under the War on Poverty was just what the doctor ordered to wean marginal middle-class Blacks off any radical notions of collective empowerment rather than selfish individualism. But the BPP was not reformist. Alongside its community programs for radical reform was a genuine commitment to revolution, an advocacy of and preparation for a radical transformation of U.S. Society. Unlike many leading “civil rights” organizations of the time, the BPP believed that only with a revolution of values and radical change of political power in the dominant white society could Black political self-determination occur. In the politically expedient embrace of Johnson’s “Great Society” and civil rights legislation, Richard Nixon ascended to the U.S. presidency and immediately pushed the “1968 Omnibus Crime Bill” through a compliant Congress, thereby providing law enforcement with additional tools for containment of racial unrest under the pretext of the “war on crime.” There was also police murder and violence. For example, on December 4, 1969, Chicago police, aided by information provided by an FBI informant, fired hundreds of rounds into the apartment of Chairman Fred Hampton, killing him and BPP member Mark Clark. Fred Hampton was killed as he lay in his bed, drugged from the Seconal secretly given to him. The U.S. government understood that the Panthers, unlike the majority of African American civil and human rights organizations, clearly understood the crucial and pivotal issue of racist violence in America and its deep connection to the state and its “criminal justice system.” Consequently, the Panthers’ perception of organized armed resistance to state repression, terrorism, and criminalization of Black youth as essentially a strategy of “imposition of political consequences” for state-sponsored terrorism. It was as necessary to any people’s struggle for freedom from a powerfully entrenched and violent adversary as nonviolent mass protests. History supported the Panthers’ perception. Whenever people—the lower classes, exploited, and disenfranchised—rise up against their rulers inevitably the police/military apparatus of the state violently represses any popular uprising, movement, civil disobedience that threatens the existing order. The attempt by the State of California to execute the leader of the BPP marked the beginning of an escalated and coordinated national police campaign to eliminate the Panthers’ local and regional leadership. By 1969 the popularity of the BPP extended far beyond inner-city neighborhoods. Functional alliances were formed that were based on professed principles derived from anti-imperialist and Afrocentric liberation movements (the latter an ongoing radicalization of Malcolm X’s internationalist concepts) accompanied with a class analysis based on the African American experience. The

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BPP’s radicalism affected other national minorities who formed cadre-like community defense formations: the Brown Berets (Chicano/Mexicana), the Young Lords Party (Puerto Rican), the Young Patriot Party (working-class/ student white youth) are the more commonly known. By mid-1969, the BPP put out a national call for a “United Front Against Fascism” that challenged the radical left in general and the Black nationalist movement in particular to build in their communities democratic and institutional frameworks to combat the militarization of police and state repression. Police decentralization and community control of public safety were the ascendant features of this consolidation effort. But the BPP had to respond to the infiltration, police raids on its offices, targeted assassination of its leaders, prosecution of its leaders, and suppression of its major source of income: The Black Panther newspaper. Its first response to state repression was to “close the Party” to new membership. This would be organizational anathema for a “mass-based political party,” but the BPP was no ordinary “mass political party” or left radical formation. The BPP, circa 1966–1971, was a paramilitary political as well as socio-cultural formation that, by default, represented the historical Black armed resistance to violent white supremacy in America. Understood in these terms, it is self-evident that the BPP was not armed merely for revolutionary theater, macho posturing, or publicity, but to assert in the most direct terms possible Black people’s right to resist racist attacks and police repression. Given the huge disparity between the power of the state and a small civilian organization, the BPP’s survival required and generated an underground component, a clandestine capability to achieve and underscore the political and strategic objectives of the Party. Although the BPP was popular it could be physically eradicated and isolated if it did not expand its influence and support base. Emerging from the BPP’s call for radical unity against the burgeoning power of the militarized police state were local coalitions designated “National Committees to Combat Fascism.” NCCF chapters sprang up across the U.S. in places where BPP chapters had either been depleted by police attack or had never existed. The timeliness of the call to political arms against rising police state–style repression was evident by the fact that radical whites, progressive students, organized their own NCCF chapters in communities where they struggled and lived. This BPP strategy—to build a broader radical “United Front Against Fascism” and consolidate the prevailing anti-establishment youth culture behind its leadership, (i.e., a Black Liberation Movement and a politically insurgent “Black Power” movement)—was only partially successful. But it nonetheless alarmed law enforcement authorities and discomfited

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their Black collaborators.10 The NYPD, in particular, noted the BPP/NCCFled effort to decentralize police departments in major cities with alarm.11 The FBI’s fear index of the BPP increased in geometrical proportion to the effectiveness of the BPP’s political influence over a broad spectrum of America’s antiwar movement and the New Left. The public adulation by a significant segment of African American people was at an all-time high. BPP international solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, Palestinian people’s struggle for self-determination, and direct relations with anti-imperialist liberation movements on the African continent were equally alarming, and the Party’s penetration of the U.S. military as well as its connection to European left and student movements elicited the scrutiny of agencies outside of domestic law enforcement. U.S. military intelligence units, the CIA, U.S. State Department all targeted and monitored BPP international activities.

Achieving Legal and Moral Legitimacy by Rewriting and Ignoring the History of Black Self-Defense By May of 1971, despite the considerable amount of money and support the Panther 21 and similar cases had raised for the Party, and the international success of the “Free Huey” campaign that resulted in Newton’s acquittal and release from jail, BPP resources were depleted and programs cut back due to the relentless overt and covert police attacks and prosecutions. COINTELPRO operations continued and escalated. To exacerbate regional, personal, and political differences, the FBI had embarked upon a plan (eventually successful) to split the Black Panther Party into two factions: one on the West Coast which they called the “Newton” faction, and one of the East Coast termed the “Cleaver” faction, after Eldridge Cleaver.12 While many may debate whether the split would have occurred even without FBI instigation, it is 10 Sensing the threat posed by such coalitions, the NYPD dispatched detectives to attend the founding conference 3,000 miles away in Oakland. They filed a detailed report listing all speakers and the topics that they addressed. See NYPD document, from Detective Gene Roberts to the Commanding Officer, July 21, 1969. 11 See NYPD document from the Commanding Officer, BSS, August 6, 1969, entitled “The Black Panther Party and the United Front Against Fascism,” discussing in detail the proposal to decentralize police departments. 12 In late 1968 Eldridge Cleaver, facing incarceration resulting from a police shootout, fled the United States. He eventually made it to Algeria where he and others founded the BPP’s International Section. Many of the COINTELPRO operations focused on creating dissention between Cleaver in Algeria and Newton who, after his release, remained in Oakland, California.

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beyond dispute that the FBI and local law enforcement played a central role in making the split violently irreconcilable. Using information gleaned from their wiretaps and informants, some highly placed in BPP national headquarters, the FBI created a mindset within the BPP that leaders of one faction were intent on killing the other. As one FBI document noted: It appears that Newton responds violently to any questioning of his actions or policies or reluctance to do his bidding. He obviously responds hastily without getting all the facts or consulting with others. The Bureau feels that this near hysterical reaction by the egotistical Newton is triggered by any criticism of his activity, policies or leadership qualities and some of this criticism undoubtedly is the result of our counterintelligence projects now in operation. The present chaotic situation within the BPP must be exploited and recipients must maintain the present high level of counterintelligence activity.13

FBI COINTELPRO machinations did result in deaths. Fred Bennett, Robert Webb, and Sam Napier were three of those victims. In an April 5, 1971, FBI memorandum, the New York office gleefully reported that the “dichotomy” in the BPP created by COINTELPRO had resulted in the death of Webb, apparently by Newton supporters. After the retaliatory killing of Sam Napier for Webb’s assassination in New York, the FBI lamented that with the confusion in the BPP many East Coast members chose to go underground, making it difficult to engage in COINTELPRO-like activities.14 They noted that it would obviously be “detrimental to the continuing efforts” of COINTELPRO should the two factions reach a détente.15 The BPP’s principled stand on the right of Blacks to defend themselves led them to respond to legalized racist repression by deepening and resourcing the BPP’s clandestine organization. Self-defense in face of violent state repression could not remain reactionary, passive. Self-defense had become proactive, retaliatory, a political consequence, “illegal” resistance to “legal injustice.” Armed struggle against state and rightwing racist violence and criminal elements that profited from the debilitation of the Black community—e.g., heroin, cocaine, dealers and street-sets terrorizing Black neighborhoods—devel13 See FBI airtel from Director to New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston, January 28, 1971, captioned “COINTELPRO.” 14 Napier was the West Coast distribution manager for the Panther newspaper 15 See FBI airtel from New York to Director, April 5, 1971, captioned “COINTELPRO.”

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oped as the distinct adaptation of East Coast Panthers to COINTELRPO targeting the New York 21, Geronimo Pratt, and the International Section of the BPP led by Eldridge Cleaver. The Black Liberation Army (BLA) was the conscious response of those targeted by COINTELPRO for police-style assassination or imprisonment. Some BPP members fled underground to avoid the COINTELPRO-inspired violence. Two examples were Zayd Malik Shakur, former NY Chapter Deputy Minister of Information, and Sundiata Acoli, a Panther 21 member. Both Zayd (who was killed) and Sundiata (captured) were with Assata Shakur when she was shot and wounded on the New Jersey Turnpike. Others chose to go underground to further revolutionary activity; many of today’s Black political prisoners with their activism rooted in the BPP/BLA are from this group. It must be noted that the choice of clandestine armed resistance in response to increased militarization of the police and effective COINTELPRO-orchestrated state repression of the BPP had an even broader historical basis in white-supremacist subjugation of African people in the U.S. Like all of white America’s racist stereotypical fears, white supremacy evolves to encompass the times and the shifts in class and race relations. When the BPP sent an armed delegation to the California state capital to protest changes in then-existing California gun laws aimed at curtailing armed “Panther Patrols” monitoring police conduct in the Bay Area’s Black community, it intensified the simmering debate over gun control, specifically whether the Second Amendment actually applies to the descendants of slaves. Of course, the debate wasn’t worded that way. Then as now the controversy over modern gun control is coded, designed to conceal white-majority population fears of Blacks and peoples of color. Gun regulations are more related to abridging the rights of Black Americans to armed self-defense against the organized police terror of the state than to keeping guns out of the hands of crazy apolitical criminals who, regardless of legal gun restrictions, acquire guns illegally. When the FBI embarked on its sixties-era disinformation campaign to criminalize Black radicalism it resorted to the time-honored white American practice of demonizing Black people, a practice still employed today with descriptive terms like “thug” and “super-predators” to characterize Black protesters and rebellious Black youth. In white America’s mind-set the word “criminal” has replaced “Black” as the bogeyman behind the call for stiffer gun control regulation. While right-wing gun advocates drape themselves in the Second Amendment and cloak racist vigilantism with the euphemism of “a well-regulated militia” (as stated in the Constitution), it is clear to any objective student of history that policing of Blacks in southern states was the

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rationale for ratification of the Second Amendment. The establishment of a “well-regulated militia” was a concession not only to states’ rights, but also to the institutionalization of armed slave patrols. The institutions of modern law enforcement, especially across the South, derive their origins from these slave patrols and slave codes. The generic term “law-abiding citizens” used by gun control advocates and gun lobbies to delineate those who can legally own guns only serves to underscore the historical criminalization of Black life. This is one reason why recent mass murderers had little problem acquiring legal firearms—they weren’t Black and threatening, i.e. did not have a menacing criminal persona. Cosmetic gun control reforms only attempt to address this anomaly by identifying domestic violence, mental illness, and pathological social behavior as “enlightened” reasons for non-issuance of gun licenses. These are categories many of today’s armed white law-enforcement personnel themselves fit into without similar vetting. Debate surrounding gun ownership laws presently in effect revolves around “criminal background checks” to legally proscribe access to firearms. It is a bit of legal artifice, based at least partly on universal police practices of criminalizing Blacks by employing a plethora of seemingly innocuous “stop and frisk” tactics and unwritten codes governing officer’s “discretionary” suspicion of “criminal” behavior—ranging from “driving while Black” to the absurdity of “suspicion of being suspicious” (as in the Freddie Gray case). These practices obscure the racial motive behind criminal background checks that seldom apply to the majority of whites, who are less likely to experience run-ins with the law and therefore more likely to be considered “law-abiding” and eligible. Racist law enforcement along with mass incarceration, another legal device for racial and social control, further reinforces a “whites only” access to gun ownership, use of weapons for self-defense, and the overall societal militarization. Codifying “gang-related activity” as essentially a crime-by-association, for example, virtually ensures that five out of ten Black males living in economically marginalized communities—those that are subject to political gerrymandering, housing discrimination, and high unemployment—are legally ineligible for gun ownership, merely by living in close proximity to each other. Entire Black communities are thereby unable to defend themselves against armed attacks either by predominantly white police forces or armed white vigilantes. These Black communities are not only unable to organize themselves against racial violence from without, but are incapable of organizing themselves against criminal violence from within, and therefore must rely on racist institutional law enforcement for protection. This obviously contrived paradigm of Black defenselessness is so pervasive that supposedly

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“law-abiding” Black people who “legally” qualify for gun ownership are afraid to pursue their “right to bear arms” for fear of being mistaken for a criminal by Eurocentric law enforcement! In the final analysis, fear of armed Blacks was the driving force transforming white America’s gun culture into an “inalienable” right to bear arms—right up there with Mom’s cherry pie and Disneyland. When the U.S. Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Black freedom dreams had always agitated the captive Africans’ waking nightmare of chattel servitude. As mentioned earlier, Blacks outnumbered whites in many areas, requiring state “militias” to both prevent and put down slave rebellions. Torturing and lynching our ancestors was the slaveholders’ class war on self-radicalized African slaves who dared take up arms against their rightful “owners.” The BPP, in 1967, understood this history on a very fundamental level. It was imprinted on our DNA. We clearly comprehended, if only spiritually, that racist police violence and the suppression of Black human rights, like the institution of chattel slavery itself, could only exist and function in a police state. To stand against the “pigs of the power structure” was to reaffirm the freedom dreams of our ancestors, to reclaim our humanity. For the BPP, and Black radicals generally, Malcolm X’s statement that “if you are Black and born in America, you were born in prison” meant Blacks in America lived and died at the whim of white supremacist power, and therefore existed as inmates of a police state. What “warden” would protect us from the bullets and mace of the police? Today, the racist militarized police have replaced the institutional function of the state “militias” that enforced the slave codes of 18th and 19th century America. The routine and cavalier police murders of peoples of color can only occur in a police state. The violent repression of minorities, and racist, sexist violence so endemic to American society only finds expression through the historical continuum of white male supremacy and the sociopolitical Frankenstein of America’s corporate two-party system of electoral “democratic fascism.” In the 21st century the “national security state” that evolved from the loins of America’s slaveholding propertied classes has reduced all American citizens, Black and white workers, the poor and the middle class, to the category of potential “criminals” and self-radicalizing “terrorists.” It has classified anti-racist protest and anti-establishment expression as distortions of “freedom of speech” and thereby subversive, subjecting unarmed marginalized communities to vigilante violence and state repression. In 1967, the BPP revealed that America’s gun rights advocates had only got it half twisted. It was

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not the unbridled capitalist state they feared; it was all of us not endowed with white skin male privilege, wealth, and the human right to self-defense. This became self-evident when the State of California passed its anti-Panther gun laws with hardly a peep out of the National Rifle Association in 1967.

Black Liberation Army—Striking Back After the killings of several Black youth by the NYPD in 1970 and ’71, there were shootings of police in New York City in the spring of 1971. Other armed attacks occurred in California and elsewhere. In communiqués to the media, the “Black Liberation Army” claimed responsibility for those attacks. In response, President Richard Nixon—at a White House meeting with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, John Ehrlichman, and others—ordered a “full-out” law enforcement effort to capture former BPP members who might have been involved in the attacks. The initial investigation, called “Newkill” by the FBI, would become a joint FBI-NYPD effort that would serve as a model for later police-federal collaborations such as the Joint Terrorism Task Force. 16 FBI agents who were involved in COINTELPRO became part of the Newkill task force. BPP members who were then underground—and many who were not—were considered “logical suspects” and targeted for arrest. The FBI director ordered the New York FBI Office to review appropriate files of “Black extremist” organizations, including those of so-called Third World groups to develop additional “logical suspects” and include those organizations and their leaders in target assignments given to outside agency sources. Even known Black drug dealers were leaned on for information and their networks threatened with shutdown if they failed to cooperate. Hoover instructed his minions “to consider the possibility that both attacks might be the result of revenge taken against New York City police by the Black Panther Party as a result of its arrest of BPP members in April 1969.”17 16 The creation of “Newkill” was ordered by President Richard Nixon. In an FBI memorandum authored and signed by J. Edgar Hoover himself, he states to senior officials that he had “just left a long conference with the President . . . [and assured him] that we had offered the full facilities of the Bureau” to the NYPD. See Memorandum for Mr. [Clyde] Tolson and others, May 26, 1971. In a memorandum created a day later the FBI had alerted “all of its confidential sources in the racial, criminal, and security fields” to target possible suspects in the shootings. 17 See FBI teletype from the director to New York, May 25, 1971. The “arrest of BPP members in April 1969” is a reference to the Panther 21 conspiracy case. All of those that had gone to trial were acquitted on May 13, 1971.

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Assata Shakur, who was recruited into the medical cadre of the Harlem chapter of the BPP, aligned herself with the East Coast “Cleaver” faction, and though never initially a COINTELRPO target she became a primary target of the FBI’s post-COINTRELPRO anti-urban guerrilla terrorism investigations—collectively labeled under her slave name ( JoAnne Chesimard) as “Chesrob.” Chesrob became a national anti-urban guerrilla investigation in disguise, aimed directly at destroying BLA soldiers and their clandestine infrastructure. By early 1972, the media labeled her the “soul” of the Black Liberation Army. She was labeled a suspect in virtually every New York City bank robbery where a woman was thought to have participated. Although “Chesrob” was nominally an FBI bank robbery investigation, it was really another coordinated NYPD-FBI effort to capture or kill underground BPP members and BLA members. In a few short years, former BPP members and BLA soldiers Harold Russell, Woody Green, Anthony Kimu White, and Twyman Meyers were killed during armed confrontations with the police. Others were arrested, tried, and convicted for incidents claimed by or thought to have been committed by the BLA.18 It mattered not to prosecuting agencies whether those arrested were legally “guilty” or “not guilty.” What was important was that the counterinsurgency begun under COINTELPRO, and continued under programs such as Newkill and Chesrob, effectively covered their ongoing racist repression of former BPP members and their supporters with criminal charges and prosecutions. Conspiracy trials of the sixties were emotional and cumbersome affairs that often resulted in acquittals of the defendants and creation of liberal “cause célèbre” figures, such as the Panther 21, Bobby Seale, and Dhoruba Bin Wahad. It is in the context of the post–Panther 21 acquittal, the fiasco of the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial, and the framing of Bobby Seale in New Haven for murder, that Assata Shakur’s May 2, 1973, arrest on the New Jersey Turnpike must be viewed. Along with BPP members Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli (an acquitted Panther 21 defendant, former NASA employee, and computer genius), she was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike for “driving while Black.” It is more likely that the troopers learned the identities of those in the car shortly before it was stopped. In any event, a shootout erupted. Zayd Malik 18 These include Albert “Nuh” Washington, Anthony Jalil Bottom, Herman Bell, Henry “Sha Sha” Brown, Teddy Jah Heath, Robert “Seth” Hayes, Safiya Bukhari, Ashanti Alston, Victor Cumberbatch, Oscar Washington, and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, author of this article.

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Shakur and one trooper were killed. Assata was shot while her hands were in the air attempting to surrender. She was arrested. Sundiata Acoli, though injured, managed to escape but was captured a few days later in the woods like a runaway slave. Assata was then tried for the numerous acts in which she was suspected of participating. Each trial resulted in acquittals or dismissals. It was the May 2, 1973, incident that gave rise to her only conviction and life sentence. Sundiata Acoli was also convicted in a separate trial and sentenced to life. Assata was liberated from her New Jersey prison in November 1979 and eventually surfaced in Cuba, where she was granted political asylum. Given the rapprochement of America’s relations with Cuba, Assata and her legal advisors can and should use any available means and arguments to keep her safe and free. But everyone else—supporters and those interested in justice and in an end to racist and political repression—should, as a matter of principle, place her case, and the “terrorist” designation placed on her by the FBI, in its proper context: as the continuation of a criminalization and demonization of the Black Liberation Movement. Assata’s guilt or innocence in relation to the actual charges is totally and absolutely irrelevant. Assata was part of a movement that sustained and suffered massive police and state repression under COINTELPRO, Newkill, and Chesrob. This movement for Black self-determination, the right to control institutions within the Black community and the right to self-defense, was declared “terrorist” by the U.S. government’s law enforcement agencies charged with executing its racist political destruction. With its recent posting of Assata Shakur on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, U.S. law enforcement and the U.S. Justice Department under Barack Obama reaffirmed its past illegal policies of domestic repression of political dissent, racial and the religious demonization of minority and immigrant populations. This is the political message that the “terrorist” label carries. It is our job to flatly reject that argument and to re-affirm the right of Black people and all people of color to self-determination. While it is true Assata Shakur is the victim of an injustice, that injustice is not only administered by the state but also by her so-called supporters: progressive civil libertarians and Black cultural figures who proclaim her “innocence” and dismiss the movement from which she emerged as a mere “law enforcement fantasy” propounded to rationalize their illegal police actions and give them the cover of law. Assata Shakur, in a so-called post-racial era that boasted a “Black” man in the White House, is made into a Black Madonna of abstract resistance by “millennial” activists—disconnected as an activist, freedom fighter, and soldier of a legitimate anti-racist and anti-imperialist movement. Clearly such a

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disconnect is in the political eye of the beholders and not derived from the actual history of the movement or the Black radical tradition. Progressives and civil libertarians must understand that what happened to Assata was but one part of a series of episodes during a systemic and coordinated campaign to crush a domestic revolutionary movement. A state of war existed between the state and that movement. The state succeeded in smashing the movement, and its absence today should not serve as a license for political opportunism, to exploit and misinterpret the past to suit individual agendas or develop one’s politics of “intersectional” oppression. Most of the political prisoners in American jails come from the BPP/BLA and Black nationalist movement. The system of visible and hidden racist control of African Americans that brought that movement into existence still persists, and because it still persists rebranding the Black political prisoner is unprincipled, leaving their movements up for opportunist reinterpretation. All Black political prisoners should be supported, not based on their guilt or innocence but based on the historical reality that their actions and current conditions of confinement were, and are, premised on their past relationship to a movement targeted by law enforcement and various agencies of the state—a targeting that was illegal, violent, and permanent. It is for this reason that we should not become mired in a debate over legal “guilt” or “innocence.” Was Nelson Mandela less a political prisoner worthy of freedom because he engaged in armed actions? In this country, the successful campaign to free the Puerto Rican political prisoners who were granted clemency by Bill Clinton provides an example. The campaign to free them did not admit or deny that they were “guilty” of seditious conspiracy or committed the acts attributed to them. Rather it emphasized that they are not “criminals” or “terrorists” but partisans in the struggle over Puerto Rico’s destiny. Although there are historical nuances to be considered, the political characterization of Assata as a “terrorist” by law enforcement and the cases of the Black political prisoners (her comrades) serve only one purpose—to criminalize the Black radical resistance to racist police repression: they were/ are part of a legitimate political movement for human rights and self-determination. Many of the BPP political prisoners from that era remain in jail: Anthony Jalil Bottom, 42 years; Sundiata Acoli, 40 years; Robert “Seth” Hayes, 41 years; Herman Bell, 40 years; Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, 40 years, and others. Albert “Nuh” Washington, Teddy Jah Heath, Bashir Hameed, and Abdul Majid died in prison after serving decades. Many of the arrested BPP/ BLA members had trials characterized by gross violations of due process at a time when COINTELPRO disclosures had not yet been made. But only two,

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Dhoruba Bin Wahad (the author) and the late Geronimo Pratt, were able to secure reversals of their criminal convictions and freedom from imprisonment based on COINTELPRO files. But once again, the issue after more than forty years is not guilt or innocence or whether the trials of Black activists were fair. These prisoners were and are part of a movement and after all of this time should be freed irrespective of their legal guilt or innocence. Is “restorative justice” possible after all these years? If so, to achieve it the “terrorist” label attached to our freedom fighters must be challenged not on an individual basis but politically and in correct historical context. Reconciling the so-called excesses of the past with the reality of post–Patriot Act America is a specious proposition at best. But to forthrightly declare that all political prisoners must be set free as one of many democratic principles of a mass campaign to curtail the political power of militarized law enforcement would seem more likely to succeed in freeing all political prisoners and changing Assata’s status from “most-wanted terrorist” to that of a refugee from American racial and political repression. The author wishes to acknowledge Robert J. Boyle, Esq., who contributed research and documents for this article.

NEW AGE IMPERIALISM KILLING AFRICA SOFTLY, WITH DEMOCRACY AN EXCERPT FROM THE PALE FACE BEHIND FINANCE CAPITAL SPEAKS WITH A FORKED TONGUE (AN UNPUBLISHED WORK) Dhoruba Bin Wahad

New age imperialism has its own modern-day “moral” crusade and ethical artifice of “respect for human rights” to conceal its ignoble agenda and capitalist greed. Unlike the “old school” imperialism which relied on the ethical artifice of biblical white supremacy and “Christianizing the African heathen” to rationalize cold-blooded exploitation, new age imperialism’s moral cloak is an unbelievably transparent and phony humanism and a cynical respect for “rule of law” (see note at end of article). This phony “humanism”—though not religiously based—nonetheless appeals to universal religious ethics of tolerance, and thereby distorts most people’s perception of its racist and imperialistic political objectives. Likewise, the developed nations which practice this new age imperialism are endlessly lecturing poorer nations on the need to respect the rule of law while themselves employing “legal” artifice to justify military assassination of heads of state they disfavor, or to rationalize amoral economic embargoes of poorer nations and secure unimpeded access to Third World resources. The new age imperialists consume an inordinate amount of the world’s resources and are the major source of global pollution and toxic waste. Their ideals of “free market economy” and morality of conspicuous consumption are masked by the propaganda of “environmentally friendly” multinational 125

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corporations. But despite their rhetoric, the corporate managers of new age imperialism do not respect even the rule of “natural law” and derive maximum profits in a manner which pollutes the planet and depletes its ecosystem. New age imperialists encourage greed, individualism, and selfish acquisition of power. Their ethos of conspicuous consumption appeals not just to the rich and famous but to the down and out, who are encouraged to fantasize about becoming wealthy themselves even though the dichotomy between rich and poor benefits only the rich. Finally, new age imperialism seeks to neutralize the need for Pan-African unity by further consolidating the political influence of capital over Africa’s incomplete decolonization process. With this perspective in mind the current upsurge of “democratic reforms” in Africa takes on a more sinister role, revealing the hand of new age imperialism at work on the African continent along with the nature of its political agenda. We can see that finance capital (read “dividends from colonialism”) now requires a new integrated global marketing system based on consistent recirculation of perpetual debts. This integrated (or organic) global system is meant to supplant the old imperialist economic order and alleviate the economic anomalies of Cold War rivalry between competing capitalists and socialist systems. Since the end of the Cold War, the introduction of “free market” measures on the individual “socialist” economies of Africa, were accompanied by shifts in the political policies of those African states toward a “voluntary” form of new age imperial controls and away from Pan-African interdependence. That is to say, what is supported by the major industrial and financial centers of global commerce is not “democracy” or promotion of human rights per se but promotion of those Africans who support policies of “liberal investment opportunities” and “free market development.” Only by promoting Eurocentric “political democracy” as the sole atmosphere conducive for “investment” can the integration of Third World resources into a global marketing system that fully (organically) services the needs of U.S. and European finance capital be accomplished. Colonialism integrated Africa into European economic development while under-developing Africa. New age imperialism does the same thing, but with a different twist: it integrates African “development” into European economic supremacy by regulating Africa’s markets, reinvesting African debt payments, and restricting Africa’s access to capital. It is my opinion that global economic integration, as defined by the developed industrial economies, represents the highest form of neocolonialism to date. It is imperialist by definition because of its wholesale incorporation

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and co-optation of post-colonial progressive ideas. Having said all this, it is also important to emphasize that this paper is not an attempt to discredit or subvert any particular African government or negate the achievements of progressive African regimes, especially those regimes which developed from the anti-colonial liberation movements of the sixties and seventies. The fact that this clarification is necessary in the first place indicates the relatively low level of support among African heads of state for bold and revolutionary Pan-African initiatives and their deliberate marginalization of serious Pan-African proposals made by non-governmental organizations as “utopian” whenever such proposals do not coincide with their parochial “national” interests. Perhaps one possible explanation for this hostility to Pan-African political practice is the fact that many of today’s African leaders did not emerge from anti-colonial struggles as revolutionary nationalists, but instead assumed state power as a consequence of military coups, tribal based power struggles, European meddling in regional politics, or a combination of all of these factors. For many such persons, “African unity” is a concept best left in the realm of theory because only in a disunited Africa do they achieve political relevancy. Indeed, this paper questions the very proposition that the European archetype of government, the nation-state, can provide for the empowerment of the African masses absent Afro-centric social, political, and cultural foundations—let alone express the genuine interest of the African peoples. This in itself may present a conceptual problem for some progressive brothers and sisters. After all, who wouldn’t be somewhat skeptical of an Afro-centric paradigm emerging from Africa’s current political quagmire? Unwarranted optimism aside, there undoubtedly are individual African leaders of good intent; therefore, the question needs to be asked: Is Africa’s destiny a matter of subjective leadership and personality alone, or is it a matter of seizing the historical moment before the historical moment seizes all of us? I fully understand that inevitably, whenever a Black person is critical of a political modality such as the European nation-state, he or she runs the risk of being marginalized by most African politicians—especially those who enjoy the class/caste privileges derived from administration of the postcolonial European-style state so cunningly grafted onto the African political mentality. Should opportunism, political or otherwise, persist as the raison d’être of African state power, it would not give anyone much hope for radical change in the conduct of African affairs. But should Africans genuinely interested in Africa’s total empowerment transcend their own petty differences and privileges, the conduct of African affairs will be transformed literally overnight. First, we must understand that Africans and Africa are not the primary enemy even though

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there surely exist African enemies of the African race. We must learn to give each other the benefit of doubt, rather than the certainty of condemnation. History is indeed the best subject to reward all research. We need to apply our history to the problems confronting Africa and act accordingly. Note: The “rule of law” vis-à-vis the European nation-state as a Western concept is relatively new, dating essentially back to the Magna Carta. However, it is—from an Afrocentric perspective—an artifice by which to institutionalize and regularize territorial conquest or racial subjugation. This is a historically accurate view and can be verified in exhaustive detail by examining British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial records in Africa. For example, the annexation of West Africa by the British as the “Gold Coast Territory” is a classic case of a carefully devised matrix of legal definitions justifying crimes of British military aggression, fraudulent commercial dealings, religious persecution, chattel slavery, as well as the usurpation of a sovereign people’s right to self-determination, theft of their land, and castration of their political institutions—actions which are still considered unacceptable behavior for national governments. Indeed, the USA, Britain, and their allies currently embargo a number of nations for supposedly practicing similar activity (e.g. Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Libya) and criticize others for employing varying degrees of “human rights” abuse.

MAN-CHILD IN REVOLUTION LAND Jamal Joseph

On June 15, 2016, Kathleen Cleaver and I were in Harlem as the guest speakers at an event called “Black Power 50” at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Sister Kathleen—now an attorney and law professor at Emory University—and myself—now a writer, director, youth mentor, and film professor at Columbia University—had an hour-long conversation about “Black Power” as first proclaimed in 1966 by the brilliant Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and its explosion to “All Power to the People” as demanded by Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and the Black Panther Party on the streets of Oakland, California. I tried to frame it as a journey from pride and anger to awareness and revolution. There is no one correct narrative for political struggle and revolution—just as there is no one individual journey that speaks to how everyone in the struggle became active. In fact, there is no one struggle or one kind of activist. There were people fighting the three major evils of poverty, racism, and war that Dr. King outlined in the seminal speech he gave at Riverside Church exactly one year before he was assassinated. There were people who felt they were fighting against the repressive capitalist system with the possible tools of armed struggle that Malcolm X talked about in a pivotal speech given at Oxford University six months before he was murdered. In between those great 129

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men and our times is a complex history of people, ideas, struggles, losses, and victories. The causes were just and many: women’s rights, gay rights, children’s rights, housing, antiwar, police brutality, hunger, medical care, prisons, political prisoners, education, immigration, labor, and more. Some called themselves revolutionaries, others activists, freedom fighters, nationalists, Pan-Africanists, feminists, socialists, communists, anarchists, humanists—or as poet, activist, and professor Sonia Sanchez calls it, “being a human being.” But the writer/director in me honors the spirit of the African griot—the storyteller who sat in the shade of the large baobab tree and wove tales that needed to both educate and entertain. If the griot was really academic and informative, the young people in the village might say, “You don’t want to miss that griot, unless you’re ignorant and want to take a nap cause you think he (or she) is boring as hell. Let’s go to the next village cause their griot is popping and all the young folks are there.” On the other hand, if you were a really entertaining griot who could sing, dance, do poetry, and play instruments, but your facts were wrong, people would call you out. “Yo, man, I know that griot is saying that Mustafa killed the lion on the hunt, but I was there and it was his little sister Keisha. Yep, seen it with my own eyes.” So, I started my “Black Power 50” remarks to a crowd of three hundred or so at the Schomburg with a griot-like story—a true story about an experience I had as a twelve-year-old boy with Pa Baltimore, my adoptive grandfather. His wife Noonie had raised me since I was five. Noonie was a domestic worker who cleaned houses and cared for other people’s children (both Black and white). Pa had done everything—boxer, merchant marine, street vendor, numbers runner—a street hustler (but always hardworking and honest). Both Noonie and Pa’s parents and older siblings had been slaves. I heard stories about slavery and firsthand accounts of lynching and the Klan. They were both proud Negroes. They had been followers of Marcus Garvey, members of the NAACP, and also Republicans because Lincoln and the Republicans had literally freed their families. Beyond being proud, Pa was what you called a “race man”—not only did he not fear white people, he didn’t give a damn about white people. At a time when there were no Black studies programs and no mention of any Negroes in any of my history books, Pa (a man with a sixth-grade education) would home-school me about Crispus Attucks (a Negro who was the first to die in the American revolution), Benjamin Banneker (who designed clocks and also the layout of Washington, DC), Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and the abolitionist movement. His history lessons were informal, conversational, and impromptu, often held in the living room while I was trying to watch Grandma’s old black-and-white TV. Here’s the story I told the Schomburg audience:

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Pa and I were watching a Tarzan movie—Pa in his favorite chair, me on the couch allegedly doing math homework. Tarzan swings across the screen on a vine doing his famous Tarzan yell. He lands to confront some evil white hunters who are holding a damsel in distress at rifle point. Africans (many of them white actors in black body paint) stand nearby looking fearful, bug-eyed, and ignorant. Tarzan calls out to the jungle in “Tarzaneze,” and elephants, lions, tigers, and a cute chimp with an IQ far superior to the Africans charge in from all directions to help Tarzan defeat the evil hunters and rescue the damsel. Pa Baltimore watched the scene with great intensity before interrogating the TV (and me) with a “What the fuck is that? Tell me how in the hell a little cracker-assed baby fall out a plane and run the jungle! He can speak lion, tiger, monkey, and the Africans standing around like they crazy. Boy, change the damn channel!” This was my introduction to critical media theory through the lens of race and class. I laughed because Pa’s delivery was perfect and he had a PhD in cussing and talking smack. But he made me aware that racism was everywhere and that white America was shady. After the audience had a good laugh I quoted an H. Rap Brown (now known as Imam Jamil Al-Amin) speech about cultural brainwashing. Rap’s timing and delivery was on par with Pa Baltimore. “You wear black to funerals and white to weddings,” Rap scowled. “In cowboy movies, the good guys wear the white hats, the villains wear black. Angel food cake is white cake, devil’s food cake is black. Black magic is bad, white magic is good. Even Santa Claus!” Rap would then deliver the punchline. “Tell me how in hell a fat, redneck, camel-breath honkey can slide down a black chimney and still come out white! I’m telling you—you’ve been brainwashed!” Kathleen and I talked about the rapid evolution of “Black Power” from the “Black is Beautiful” pride of Afros and dashikis to the direct action of campus take-overs and armed patrols of police by Black Panthers. We also talked about the Panthers’ ideological expansion of “Black Power” to “All Power to the People” and the famous Panther breakdown of the greeting: “That means Black power to Black people!” Great Panther orators like Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton, or Kathleen herself would explain, “white power to white people, brown power to brown people, red power to red people, yellow power to yellow people, and Panther power to the vanguard!” For all those shocked that the Black Panthers would give a shout-out to white power, the Panthers would explain that “white power” and the oppression by the white power structure were not the same thing. In fact, most white people in the country were poor or working poor and being ripped off and stomped down by the same capitalist system that is oppressing

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people of color. Organizing the “masses” around the idea of revolutionary class struggle is what caused the Panthers to be attacked overtly by the police and covertly by the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Kathleen and I went on to point out that Dr. King and Malcolm X were also killed when they started talking about capitalism and class struggle. Yes, people fighting for racial equality have been imprisoned and killed throughout U.S. history—but calling for class struggle and organizing the many into a progressive coalition is guaranteed to evoke fury from the ruling class. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the founders of the Black Panther Party, understood that Black Power had to evolve beyond the affirming culture and fashion of “Black is Beautiful,” the educational demands for Black studies, the co-op capitalist’s demand for Black jobs and Black businesses, a Black exodus to the African motherland, or the Black nationalist’s demand for a separate nation-state. A struggle that understood race and class oppression needed to fight for all oppressed people and demand “All power to (all) the people.” Then, from the stage of the Schomburg, I got to channel Bobby Seale and Fred Hampton, who sounded like preacher-poets when they would say, “That means Black power for Black people, white power for white people, brown power for brown people, red power for red people and Panther power to the vanguard!” The crowd applauded. Kathleen talked brilliantly about her evolution from a SNCC organizer to a member of the Black Panther Party’s governing central committee. Stokely Carmichael (known later in life as Kwame Ture) was the first to give popular voice to “Black Power” as a response to the frustrations of nonviolent students and civil rights workers in the face of an increasingly brutal and violent white America. H. Rap Brown, another charismatic SNCC leader who followed Carmichael as chair of that organization, talked about self-defense and the revolutionary face of “Black Power” by saying that “violence is as American as cherry pie”—so why not be willing to shed blood and die for our liberation? When Rap got arrested on a gun charge in Louisiana, he told the press gathered as he was released on bail, “If you thought my rifle was bad, wait till you see my atom bomb!” Rap and Stokely both brought their brilliance, boldness, and swagger to the Black Panther Party and respectively served as minister of justice and prime minister. It was a high point in Panther history, when chapters were opening in some thirty-plus cities across the USA and all of the Panthers and rainbow supporters were united around freeing one major political prisoner: cofounder and minister of defense Huey P. Newton. As a new young Panther who proudly and constantly wore my crisp new black beret and the black leather jacket that my grandma had given me for

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Christmas, I thought all we had to do was free Huey and he would lead to us to the revolutionary promised land. Of course, we had to get the community ready for revolution so I worked with Afeni, Lumumba, Dhoruba, Sekou, Cetewayo, and other Harlem and Bronx Panthers organizing tenants, students, and health care workers. We stopped city marshals from throwing families out into the cold, took over hospitals and turned them into “people’s clinics,” kept schools open and taught classes during teachers’ strikes that we felt were anti-community, escorted and brought food to the elderly, settled countless fights and disputes in the community without the help or the invitation of the police. Being a Panther meant working in the community everyday—concrete action programs, not just words and slogans. “Freedom to a hungry person is a meal,” I told the Schomburg audience; “liberation to a homeless person is a safe, warm, dry place to sleep.” It’s why the Panther free breakfast program remains one of the Party’s greatest achievements. It was Bobby Seale’s vision—he pointed out that young children can’t be expected to understand that three apples plus two apples equals five apples when their stomachs are growling. Without funding or permission from anyone, the Panthers set about to address this problem and at the same time used the breakfast program to raise awareness by pointing out the “capitalist pigs’” lack of desire or interest in feeding our children—even though we are living in the richest nation in the world. We identified our communities as colonies that suffer the same exploitation and oppression as Third World colonies around the world. We identified the wealthy, privileged, and government zones as the mother country, and even called our beloved white comrades outside of the hood “white mother country radicals.” My good buddy Neil, a white high school student from New Jersey, would drive his beat-up, peace-sign-covered Volkswagen van around to help me and other Harlem Panthers make our food pick-ups for the breakfast program. The breakfast program was all vision and dedication—no money. Panthers would ask churches and community centers to donate their kitchens and dining rooms. Many said no, but enough said yes. Then we would ask store owners in the neighborhood for weekly food donations. A case of milk and cereal here, a case of pancake mix and eggs there. Fliers would be handed to kids and their parents by enthusiastic young Panthers. And yes, we were young. I was one of the youngest at age fifteen, but most Panthers were in their teens and early twenties. The average age of a rank-and-file Panther member was nineteen or twenty. The first week at a location, ten or fifteen kids would show up for breakfast. By the end of the month, it would be between seventy-five and a hundred. It’s estimated that the Panthers fed about thirty thousand kids nationally each week.

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Kathleen and I used the breakfast program, health clinics, food baskets, clothing programs, and liberation schools as examples of revolutionary community organizing. My oldest son, Jamal Jr., a Columbia University MFA in film, has sickle cell anemia and bravely fought through some tough and near-fatal sickle cell episodes. He is an activist and one of the organizers of an annual sickle cell conference held at Mount Sinai Hospital. Last year, a white doctor who is a leader in sickle cell research opened his speech by giving credit to the Black Panther Party for having the first national program of sickle cell testing, and for raising awareness about sickle cell anemia. There are community programs across the country (clinics, schools, clothing programs) that say they were inspired by Panther programs. Ericka Huggins (professor, Panther, former political prisoner) points out that the breakfast program shamed the government into funding food programs across the country—funding that Republicans are now trying to cut. ** As a fifteen-year-old high school student, a choir boy, and a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) youth council, my American dream was of college, becoming a lawyer, or in moments of liberated imagination, a star ship commander like Captain Kirk of Star Trek, my favorite TV show. My adoptive grandmother “Noonie” did her best as a single parent to instill her Baptist Church–rooted values of “love thy neighbor.” My Black American reality was that Dr. King had been murdered, ghettos across America were going up in riots and flames, and I was a fatherless, angry man-child who had been called “nigger” and smacked around by white cops a few too many times. After Pa Baltimore passed away from a stroke in a crowded, dirty hospital ward, I worked part-time as a stock and delivery boy at the supermarket so that Noonie wouldn’t have to give me an allowance from her tight income—a combination of social security and part-time housekeeping work. I would sweep, mop, and vacuum so that Noonie would not have to do any more bending or scrubbing when she pulled her tired body up the stairs to our second floor apartment. Noonie and I were close, I loved and respected her, but she was seventy and I was fifteen—and a hip, cool path to manhood was on the streets. The Bronx and Harlem street corners I passed and sometimes hung out on had gangs, drugs, craps games, fights, hustlers, foxy ladies, and patrolling cops that had to be eluded even when you were doing no wrong. The teens and men who held court there were living examples of how to walk, talk, swagger, and fight

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your way into the manhood ranking system of being a “cool,” “bad,” or “crazy” dude—which was the highest honor. The corners also had “warrior prophets” who talked about Black pride, progress, and revolution. Some would be respected “bad” and “crazy” dudes who had gone to prison or to the Vietnam War and came back with something they called “Black consciousness.” They critiqued drugs, hustling, and violence as tools of oppression. They not only gave the corner contrast—they gave it context, and I was fascinated! The evening news was filled with images of civil rights marchers and antiwar protesters being beaten and tear-gassed by cops and National Guard troops. Black militant leaders uttering phrases like “burn baby burn!”—not quite neo-Marxist revolution, but definitely a raised fist on the angry pulse of a lot of Black folks. The Afros, dashikis, and denim jackets the militants wore became the style of the day from schools to the street corners. We wore our Afros and dashikis to church, to marches, and to NAACP meetings. The elders frowned but tolerated us with memories of the “wild styles” they wore when they were young. Then Dr. King was killed and style became ideology. A generation of Black youth became instantly radicalized. I went down to 125th Street where riots were happening and almost got shot by cops. A group of men I later found out were Panthers saved me and sent me home. A few days later I saw a news story about Black Panthers on TV. In Oakland, California, Panthers would patrol the streets at night with legally owned shotguns and law books. Police brutality and false arrests dropped dramatically. The response of the state legislature was to change the gun laws so that Black Panthers could no longer do armed patrols. The Panther’s response was to interrupt the hearings with guns and proclamations in hand. Panther leaders told the press that Black people had a constitutional right to bear arms to defend themselves. Now I was more than fascinated—I was blown away! That night, as I watched Star Trek, I realized that Captain Kirk punched somebody out or used his phaser on damn near every mission. I may not be able to get on a star ship to promote justice in the universe, but I was boldly going to seek out the Black Panthers! During the long subway ride to the Panther office, two of my older friends told me that I might have to kill a white dude or maybe even a cop to prove myself to the Panthers. I sat in the back of my first Panther meeting psyching myself with the courage to prove I was a “bad-assed, crazy dude.” In the middle of a discussion about better education, I jumped up and said that I was ready to get a gun and kill a white dude. The Panther running

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the meeting called me up and handed me a stack of books. He “armed me,” but not the way I had anticipated. In the coming weeks, the Panthers sent me on a number of missions. I had to make and serve pancakes to children in the Panthers breakfast program. I had to help tenants paint and make repairs to run down buildings that were on rent strike. I tutored first and second graders in the community-run Liberation Schools. “Organize people around their needs,” Afeni Shakur once told me. “A true revolutionary is motivated by love.” There were a couple of rifles in the Panther office and at Panther apartments. Fred Hampton had been murdered in his sleep during a raid by Chicago police. Panther homes and offices had been raided and even bombed around the country. Young Panthers took turns standing guard at night, waiting for the squad cars and tanks to come. I was arrested at sixteen and indicted as part of the Panther 21 conspiracy case. Although acquitted of those charges, I would spend nine years in prison for leading raids on drug dens and hiding out people wanted by the authorities. “Hey, Scotty, beam me up!” No transporter beam came. I instead received the wise advice from an old convict not to serve my time but to let my time serve me. I earned two college degrees, organized a theater company, and became a writer in prison. But let’s beam back to the Schomburg! The public conversation with Kathleen and me turned to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program infamously codenamed COINTELPRO. With approval and funding from Congress, the FBI wiretapped, photographed, and filmed Panthers and other activists and organizations from Dr. King and SNCC to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican Street gang that evolved into a revolutionary party that believed in class struggle and Puerto Rican independence. Beyond gathering intelligence, the FBI launched a vicious campaign of disinformation which included writing and sending letters to Panthers and supporters designed to create suspicion and paranoia, using informers and undercover cops to provoke and frame Panthers, and providing false “intelligence” that incited local police to arrest, attack, and murder Panthers. After an hour of conversation between Kathleen and me, we opened up for questions from the audience. “What do you think of Black Lives Matter compared to the Panthers?” “They’re different,” Kathleen responded. “The Panthers talked about armed struggle and political organizing in the community. Now we go on pro-

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tests over police killings and policy, as compared to a movement that wanted to dismantle state power and institutionalized racism and repression.” “What do you think about the New Black Panther Party?” “Nothing!” Kathleen snapped. “Next question!” Most original Panthers feel that the New Black Panther Party is not worthy of discussion or recognition—especially after their brutal gang beat-down of Panther 21 icon Dhoruba Bin Wahad at one of their rallies in Atlanta. Besides berets and leather coats, nothing about the New Black Panthers resembles the Black Panther Party. Then a twelve-year-old Black man-child named Phoenix stepped to the Q&A microphone. “I want to be an activist but I don’t want to go to prison or be killed,” he stated in a voice filled with innocence and hope. If the room didn’t stop, my own heart, mind, and spirit certainly did. Phoenix would not have to ask this question at a career and educational panel filled with doctors, lawyers, teachers, or alumni of great colleges and universities. But on considering activism as a calling, as a noble profession, young Phoenix had studied enough and learned enough to be rightfully afraid for his life. In that moment, I was reminded of how little had changed in fifty years since the founding of the Black Panther Party. If you read the 10-Point Program of the BPP, you’ll be amazed at how unflinching and on-point it was about taking on critical issues facing the community. Point 2—We want full employment for our people. Point 3—We want decent housing fit for shelter for human beings. Point 7—We want an immediate end to police brutality. Point 8—We want all Black men and women freed from federal, state, city and county prisons.

You will also be saddened that none of the points in the 10-Point Program have been realized. In fact, prison populations have jumped from a few hundred thousand to 2.3 million people. Police terror continues. And our communities are impoverished and underserved. But a twelve-year-old boy named Phoenix, brought to a Panther event by his educated and progressive mother, had the courage to stand up and express both his desire to make a difference and his fear of the price America imposes on those seeking change. We assured Phoenix that not every activist winds up in prison or dead. I asked him to meet me after the event so I could tell him about a creative arts and youth activist program I cofounded with producing legend Voza Rivers

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and my wife Joyce. Our sons, Jamal Jr. and Jad, and daughter Jindai spent formative years in the program and are still passionate about arts and activism in their post-college years. Later that week I spoke at a Harlem high school graduation. It was a celebratory event with many of the graduates in this dedicated school heading to college. I was caught off guard when the African American male principal presented the last diploma to the parents of an eighteen-year-old Black manchild who had been killed a few weeks earlier. For the second time in a week my world stopped. The same night I walked with my wife and daughter to a cool millennial restaurant on Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem. French bistros, Italian cafés, and sushi lounges now line the former Lenox Avenue that had been home to collapsing tenements, liquor stores, and fish-and-chip joints. New wave Harlemites can walk from their million-dollar condominiums and multimillion-dollar brownstones to dozens of eateries and social gathering spots. A few feet away from one restaurant destination was a crowd of about fifty young people standing around a sidewalk altar of candles and flowers for another young Black man who had been killed: gang violence of rage turned inward—young men and women relegated to the Harlem apartheid zones of housing projects and sub-ghettoized blocks and buildings in the “New Harlem.” These young men and women will never live in those condos or eat in those restaurants. The young men will have a one-in-eight chance of going to college but a one-in-three guarantee of going to prison. The young women will be the mostly likely to suffer physical and sexual abuse and to be infected with HIV. As they catch bits and pieces of Black Lives Matter protests on their cell phones, will there be any context, person, or movement that is in their communities, in their faces—in their hearts and spirit—letting them know that their lives matter? The Black Panther community programs weren’t just staffed by Panthers. There were men, women, teens, and elders from the block side by side with Panthers, giving out the food and clothing. Some became Panthers; others radicalized in different ways. Some just continued to be “good folk from the block who loved the community.” Ask any Panther what our number one principal or belief was, and the guaranteed answer will be “to have an undying love for the people.” One of the points I made at the Schomburg that seemed to surprise the audience was something I was taught in an early political education class: that the goal of the Black Panther Party was not to have everybody in the Black community become a Panther, but rather to show the community—by example— the possibility of struggle and thereby make the Black Panther Party obsolete.

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As my Panther teachers would say, “Freedom Is—we all know we’re free; you dig?” It has been forty-eight years since a skinny, fifteen-year-old had the courage and audacity to walk into a Panther office and ask for a gun. I am now a professor of professional practice of film at Columbia University, founder and executive director of Impact Repertory Youth Theater in Harlem, husband, and dad to three kids who attended Columbia and Brown. At many events, I am introduced as a former Black Panther. Many of us have cast the “former” aside and just say “Panther.” There are organizations that claim to be inspired by the Black Panthers, putting bounties on people and calling for armed rebellion. Members of the original Black Panther Party (many now in their ’60s and ’70s) cringe at this. In the sixties, the Panthers moved from guns and law books to service and community programs. Original Panthers would be patrolling the streets, this time with cell phone cameras as many young activists are doing. We would still be organizing and serving, in community-based free food, health, and education programs. As Mao Zedong said in the Red Book which all Panthers carried, “Pay more attention to the condition of the masses and less attention to the methods of work.” As my beloved Panther big sister Afeni said at the funeral of young Yafeu Akiyele Fula Odinga (aka Yaki Kadafi)—Panther Sekou Odinga and Yaasmyn Fula’s son—choking back the pain at the loss of her godson Yafeu and the recent loss of her birth son Tupac: “As we cry for Yafeu and Tupac, look around at all these young people standing in the back of this church and the hundreds of others standing outside because they couldn’t get in. They’re alive and they need us!” I walked into my youth program the Saturday following the Schomburg event, the high school graduation, and passing the Harlem street altar, feeling the weight of all I haven’t done as a Panther, artist, educator, or activist. And there, among a group of twenty teens and tweens waiting to join the Impact Program, was young Phoenix and his brother Indigo. I breathed, I smiled, I gathered my young staff who had grown up in the program who now had returned as mentors and teachers. And I said, “All power to the people. Let’s begin.”

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Unidentified Panther 21 supporter, New York, circa 1970.

Photo Section: Original Work by Stephen Shames

Jamal Joseph with unidentified baby.

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Panther 21 codefendants Michael â&#x20AC;&#x153;Cetewayoâ&#x20AC;? Tabor, Joan Bird, and Dhoruba Bin Wahad.

Photo Section: Original Work by Stephen Shames

Panther activist Ila Mason and Panther 21 codefendant Jamal Joseph in political education class.

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New York Black Panther Party Harlem office front, circa 1970.

Photo Section: Original Work by Stephen Shames

Assata Shakur in Panther political education class.

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Photo Section: Original Work by Stephen Shames

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Haji Abba Salahdeen Shakur (with Mariyama Shakur), father of Panther 21 codefendant Lumumba Shakur and New York Panther activist Zayd Shakur, in front of the Manhattan courthouse during the trial.

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Panther 21 codefendant Michael â&#x20AC;&#x153;Cetewayoâ&#x20AC;? Tabor and Panther activist Connie Matthews.

Photo Section: Original Work by Stephen Shames

Dhoruba Bin Wahad.

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Zayd Malik Shakur.

Photo Section: Original Work by Stephen Shames

Jamal Joseph.

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Unidentified Panther 21 supporters.

Photo Section: Original Work by Stephen Shames

Panther picket line at the courthouse during the Panther 21 trial.

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Unidentified Panther 21 supporter.